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[ Whole Number 206 

U. S. BUREAU OF EDUCATION. 

KEFKINT OF CHAPTER XXIV OF THE REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER 
OF EDUCATION FOR 1890-91 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN \lGli 



1890-91 

W(0 



A, / 

By REV. a: D. MAYO, M. A. 



WASHmGTON: 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, 
1894. 



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14575 






CHAPTER XXIY. 
EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTEEX VIRGINIA. 

By Kov. A. i>. Mayu, m. a. 



In the year 1734, Orang-e County of the colony of Virginia in theory 
included the whole of the present United States of America west of the 
Blue Kidge Mountains. In 1738 th.e new counties of Augusta and 
Frederick covered the vast area of the present States of West Virginia, 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wiscousin, and the major part of what 
is now the New Dominion. In 1703, by treaty with France, Virginia was 
reduced to the territory east of the Mississi])pi Eiver and north of the 
present boundary of Tennessee. Later, in the early days of the new 
Republic, the release other ancient claim upon the original Northwest 
curtailed her boundary to the still noble dimensions of the conunon- 
wealth of 1860. The secession of '• the Mother of Presidents" from the 
Union her great statesmen had done so much to create, in 1801, was 
the signal for an important section of her own territory to follow her 
example, and the present State of West Virginia is now a prosperous 
and worthy member of the splendid group of seven northwestern com- 
monwealths between the Alleghanies and the Mississi])i)i. The Vir- 
ginia of to-day consists of the one hundred counties between the sea 
and the high mountain ranges which divide its southwestern realm from 
West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. What may be called 
soutliwestern Virginia, for the i)urpose of this essay, with no attem])t 
at strict accuracy in the division, is contained in the; twenty-live 
counties between the city of Iloanoke and the western border of the 
State. The names of these counties are Roanoke, Craig, Alleghany, 
Bath, Higldand, Giles, Bland, Buchanan, Dickinson, Wise, Lee, Scott, 
Russell, Washington, Tazewell, Smyth, G' ay son, Wythe, Pulaski, Mont- 
gomery, Floyd, Carroll, Patrick, Henry, Franklin. 

In the year 1805, at the close of the great civil conflict, the Old 
Dominion, east of Augusta County, presented one of the most melan- 
choly specimens of the ruin wrought by war in modern tinies. For 
four years it had been the most desperate battle ground for the 
jjreservation of the Union. As the mighty struggle neared its conclu- 
sion the grand armies of the Republic and tlie Confederacy, led by 
their most eminent commanders, all turned their faces toward east 
Virginia. Here was seen the closing act of the drama, in the fall of 
the Confederate capital and the surrender of the army that from the 
first had been the most stubborn and successful defender of "the lost 
cause." Through the entire realm between the Alleghany Mountains 
and the sea, old Virginia had been ravaged by the surging to and fro 
of the contending hosts of the rival powers, batthng for the State of 
Washington and Jefi'erson. Almost every square mile had its woeful 

881 



882 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

record of bloody encounter. Its cities were in ruins, its plantations 
ravaged, and its whole industrial order overthrown. So complete was 
the destruction that entire regions of this older part of the State, after 
twenty-five years, are only beginning to recuperate. Indeed, imfyortant 
sections of the Virginia of the Eevolution are now virtually abandoned 
territory, biding the time of the heroic investment of capital and labor 
necessary for reclaiming lands hallowed by the most sacred historical 
memories of the olden days. 

In the year 1861, at the opening of the war, Virginia, east of the 
Alleghany range, led the entire tilteen States of the South in the ar- 
rangements for the secondary and higlier education. The State Uni- 
versity, founded by Jefferson in 1820, in Albemarle County, had the 
undisputed leadership of the colleges in all the Southern and Southwest- 
ern States. Eandolph-Macon, Hampden-Sidney, William and Mary, 
still existing, and Washington College, at Lexington, were known and 
lield in high esteem. In the southwest, Emory and Henry, nestling in 
its lovely valley, gathered a large body of students from many distant 
States. Hollins Institute, in Botetourt County, was the best-known 
and probably the most efltective seminary for girls in the South, draw- 
i]ig large numbers of her students Irom distant communities. The 
original plan of Thomas Jefi'erson for a college in every county, tribu- 
tary to the State University, had never been realized; but a good num- 
ber of academical foundations, organized on the i^lan of the famous 
l)ublic schools of England, made a strong point of the classics and 
mathematics and held up the standard of old-time liberal culture. 
The superior graduates of these institutions became the leading presi- 
dents and professors of the collegiate and academical establishments 
through the South, especially in the Southwest; even contributing lib- 
erally to the same class of teachers in the States north of the Ohio. 
Tliere was a good deal of vigorous private and family schooling and 
tutoring among the wealthy families, and a habit of sending to the best 
Northern and European schools. The one weak point was tlie crude and 
meager arrangements for the common schooling of the masses of white 
people, even in this portion of the State a numerous class, and in the 
western country beyond the range of slave cultivation including a 
large proportion of the entire poj^ulation. There are no reliable statis- 
tics of popular education in Virginia during these 250 years, but enough 
is known to make painfully evident the neglect of this, the only dura- 
ble foundation on which to build a republican State. 

A few of these leading schools held on in a half-hearted way during 
the stormy years of the war. Among them was Hollins Institute, the 
foremost institute for girls. It is a striking indication of the confi- 
dence of even the leading educational men of the State in the ultimate 
success of the cause, that at the last conimeiicement season of this institu- 
tion before the fall of Richmond, while Grant was closing in on Peters- 
burg and Sherman fighting his way to Atlanta, the management of 
this institution responded to the ablest plea for the normal training ot 
teachers ever made in the South by Prof. Edward Joynes, and voted 
to reorganize this academy as a normal school for the instruction of 
the young women who would be called to serve in the new educational 
system of the Confederacy. The majority of the older seats of learning 
were suspended during this year, many of their buildings destroyed 
or greatly injured by use for hospital and other military jmrposes. The 
State owes to Gen. Philij) Sheridan the preservation of the quaint 
buildings of the university, at Charlottesville, and, after unaccounta- 
ble delays, the Congress of the United States has at last reimbursed 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 883 

William and Mary College for the unauthorized huruing- of its build- 
ings in the peninsular campaign. 

iu southwestern Virginia the material ruin of the war was less evi- 
dent. There had been" c<miparatively little serious lighting in the re- 
gion below Ljnehburg, save where an occasional raid had left a black 
and blasted tract in its w\ake. Outside of the valleys where the chief 
slave population was concentrated, there had been no especial hiss 
from occupation. The people of these highland counties were mostly 
independent farmers, and, notwithstanding the fearful drain of the con- 
scription for the army, were left with a country not seriously injured 
by overcnlture in the past. But the educational destruction was even 
greater in this portion of the State. Outside a few collegiate and 
academical schools, attended by a small percentage of the school popu- 
lation, there had never been any well organized or efficient system of 
popular instruction on the ground. The majority of even the better-off 
families were now unable "to resume their old-time habit of sending 
their children from home to distant schools. A feeble attempt to re- 
establish the " Old Field " system of subscription schools, taught by 
itinerant masters, often under conditions that would dampen the zeal 
of the most ambitious student, seems to be all that was done for sev- 
eral years. Meanwhile illiteracy was on the increase among the humbler 
classes of white people and the colored folk were compelled to depend 
largely upon the missionary zeal of teachers sent from the various 
churciies and educational societies of the North for the inauguration 
of their educational life. 

He would have been regarded a visionary indeed who in this dis- 
mal emergency should have prophesied that on the sacred soil of the 
Old Dominion, memorable as the home of great men, within a brief 
generation, not yet thirty years from the surrender at Appomattox, 
would have been revealed what we now behold; for, si)ite of this 
destruction in the older part of the State, the revival of material pros- 
perity has justified the prophecy of Washington in a marvelous degree. 
The Virginia of 1892 is steadily being renewed in all that makes an 
American State powerful and prosperous, and nowhere is this progress 
more evident than in the region left to it in the deprivation of the great 
undeveloped territory now its neighboring State of West Virginia. In 
its depression, almost its despair, the ancient Commonwealth has 
" lifted its eyes unto the hills" of its new southwest, and thence "cometh 
its help." 

The eye of the Father of his Country was always on this great south- 
west in the darkest hour of the Eevolutiou. Into that mysterious wil- 
derness he would retreat, if worst came to worst, and prolong the 
battle for the freedom of the colonies through indefinite years. And 
w hen the good fight was won he still looked westward in ])rophetic 
consideration of the swarming myriads that should people the lands 
toward the sunset. He was always saying, " W^e must bind these peo- 
ple of the new West to us by bands of steel." His favorite idea of a 
canal from the seaboard to the valley of the Ohio antedated the more 
practical scheme of De Witt Clinton by a generation. In his will 
he left stock in these projected waterways to found a national uni- 
versity at Washingt(m, in which the favored male youth of the several 
States should be educated together by American teachers into a pha- 
lanx of patriotic leaders of the new American citizenship. His especial 
plan failed of acccmplisliment, but the ways of water and steel now 
bind the shore of the Atlantic to the mighty West. The University 
of Virginia was the real mother of the system of State universities 



884 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

that now lias the leadership in the education of every State beyond tlie 
okl Angusta County line, while the city of Washington has already 
become a national university whose opportunities for abroad and patri- 
otic culture surpass even the dream of the great lirst President of the 
Eepublic. 

On every side the traveler now sees the evidence of the advancing 
material iJiosperity and power of the new Dominion of Virginia. 
Within the past twenty-five years two great lines of railroad have 
spanned the 500 miles between the sea and the Ohio Valley, while two 
systems of almost equal inii)ortnnce bind it to the South and South- 
west, and the Baltimore and Ohio, the great highland railroad of the 
civil war, is still expanding its facilities. Hampton Eoads is rapidly 
becoming the Atlantic harbor that one marvels it has not been from 
the beginning. At the mouth of the James Eiver is springing up a 
new city, the rival of busy Norfolk, across its broad and beautiful bay. 
Richmond is becoming a notable center of the manufacturing industry 
she resisted for years in the interest of a narrow industrial and polit- 
ical theory. Southside Virginia is being wrought up into vast garden, 
orchard, and tobacco plantations, with old villages rising into new 
cities. Alexandria is bestirring herself to revive her ancient days of 
('(mimercial importance, and can hardly fail to be an important manu- 
facturing annex of the IJnited States ca])ital. The Potomac is already 
regarded as one of the two noblest pleasure waterways in the eastern 
section of the Union, only rivaled by the Hudson. The quiet valley 
of the Shenandoah has not only surpassed its old time agricultural 
fame, but is now making loud proclamation of new mining and manu- 
factures more startling than the stories of its natural bridge, caverns, 
and mountain wonders in the geographies of our youth. 

But the people of Virginia are rapidly learning that the new and 
exciting hope of a material prosperity, impossible under its ancient 
regime, is burdened with its new perils and solemnized by a call for the 
noblest eftbrt of a Christian civilization. To the average politician, 
ensnared in the toils of the little expediencies of to-day; to the social 
philosopher, who leaves out the common humanity of man; to the lit- 
terateur, looking backward for inspiration into a state of society abnor- 
mal at its best and impossible to be recalled to-day, the race problem, as 
the relation between the white and colored people of the South is called, 
is a fearful portent. But the very friction of the attempt to force a reac- 
tionary policy on these expanding States of the South will compel the 
Christian civilization of the present to assert itself and boldly declare 
that the only outlet for this peril is through the broad highway of the 
gosj)el of Jesus C'lrist. The moment any man, how-ever noble by nature 
or exalted by pedigree, bends down to his weaker brother to recognize 
the image of the Creator and aid in the uplift to his own highest possi- 
bilities, all danger of race conflict disappears in the new revelation of 
the divine and human love that makes of one family all God's creatures 
on earth and in heaven. It is already seen and realized by a great and 
increasing body of the Southern people that, so far from a cause of 
discouragement, the present social situation is the call of God to the 
greatest moral achievement of the century, that is, the inauguration fof 
a vast missionary movement for the education of all its less-favored 
classes in that training of the hand, the heart, and the head which is 
the making of a true American citizenship no less than the realization 
of the brotherhood of man in the Church of Christ. 

While the mighty North" is wrestling with her prodigious effort to 
change the thronging millions of the humbler sort of European immi- 



EDUCATION m SOUTflWP^STERN VIRGINIA. 88o 

grants to a snfe, lielpful, and patriotic American people, tlie South is 
awakening to her own corresponding" obligation to lilt up, not the new- 
coineis from foreign lands, but her own ]ieople of both races, who from 
the first have been at once the source of all her ])rosperity and in lat- 
ter days the occasion of all her woes. And if this view of the situation 
seems fanciful and im])racticable, or runs against the theory or practice 
of any set of secular or sacred men, we can safely appeal to the future 
and the providence of God, nowhere displayed in more affecting and 
inspiring ways than during the past twenty live years of our American 
liistory, so crowded with warning, instruction, and inspiration to "all 
orders and conditions of men." 

To the thoughtful observer of American affairs the educational prog- 
ress of ttie sixteen exslave-holding, originally known as the Southern 
States, during the past twenty-live years, is one of the chief marvels of 
our marvelous national life. Indeed, this great movement along the 
whole line of educational advancement has practically been made in the 
twenty years since 1870, and is, by all odds, the most interesting and 
signihcant feature of the complex industrial, polirical, and social evo- 
lution we call the New South. We have already referred to the start- 
ling manner in which the prophetic common sense of Washington has 
been more than verified in the new outburst of Southern industries and 
the push for the development of the vast resources of the Southern 
States within the past fifteen years. Less evident to the supeificial 
observer, but far more radical in its quiet and irresist ible intiueuce since 
1870, has been the educational renaissance which reads like a chapter 
of the proi)hecy according to Thomas Jefferson, fulfilled almost to the 
letter, with even greater enlargement of the spirit than even that great 
man foresaw. 

To few men has been given the combination of creative genius and 
executive capacity that makes the ideal statesman. We believe that 
liistory will award the crowu of practical, sound, conservative Amer- 
ican statesmanship to the groui) of great men that looked for lead- 
ership to Washington, the most unselfish, successful, and sensible leader 
of men in modern times, with Marshall, Madison, and others of like 
broad, calm, and moderate spiiit as his fit associates. But just as 
surely does it appear that in fruitful theories of re]niblican society, 
in deep speculation concerning the ultimate foundations of just gov- 
ernment, es})ecially in the fertility of expedient and breadth of concep- 
tion concerning the fit training of the people of thirteen rival colonies 
and their probable new elements of population from abroad for the 
highest position on earth, a competent American citizenship, Thomas 
Jefferson of all his countrymen stands supreme. 

Nothing so reveals the superficial estimate of vital forces by the 
average partisan political leaders of the day as the fact that this crown- 
ing element of his fame should be so persistently overlooked. Within 
the jiast five years a noiable eulogy on the life and character of Jeffer- 
son was pronounced before a State university by a distinguished pub- 
lic man, with no especial mention of this his most prominent claim to 
the gratitude of his countrymen and the most precious heritage to his 
own Commonwealth. It may not be amiss to recapitulate the elements 
of this system of schooling for the youth of the Old Dominion, elabo- 
rated by Thomas Jefferson even before the foundati(m of the Union, 
and persisted in with an intelligent obstinacy, increasing with years, 
until the closing days of his life. 

(1) Foremost, as the basis of the whole structure, was the great cru- 
sade in behalf of religious liberty which rescued Virginia from an 



886 EDUCATION REPOTJT, 1800-91. 

ecclesiastical bondage more galliuj;' and far less respectable and moral 
than the corresponding Puritan rule of the first thirty years of the 
New England colonial life. The more closely we look at the actual 
state of colonial affairs, the more evident it seems that the new Govern- 
ment of tihe United States owed its most radical and essential feature, 
a complete separation of church and state, more to the wisdom of a 
small group of far-seeing statesmen than to any settled conviction in 
the popular mind. To Washington, Marshall, Franklin, Adams, and 
Jeflerson, and in his better days somewhat to the agitation of Thomas 
Paine, was it given to quietly place in the very heart of the new re- 
public the assertion of an absolute religious liberty of thonght and 
action, only limited by the moral law as incorporated in the Constitu- 
tion and legislation of the modern civilized state. The leadership in 
the first great battle against ecclesiastical authority in the South was 
given to Jefferson. It was clear as light to him that, without this as 
the chief corner stone, not only would repuolican institutions be im- 
possible, but all education for American citizenship would be poisoned 
at the fountain by the most desperate virus of sectarian bigotry and 
ecclesiastical despotism. All these men were deeply religious, although 
no one of them was a notable churchman in the popular sense. Their 
work was accomplished against the bitter opposition of a majority of 
the clergy, which found exjiression in a proclamation of Jefferson as 
the arch apostle of infidelity. But, once achieved, this act so com-, 
mended itself to the common religious sense of the leading laity of all 
sections that it has seldom been questioned in theory. 

(2) Next in importance in scheme of Jefferson was the emancipation 
of the slaves and their training by industrial education for Avhat then 
appeared the most practicable way of disposing of this already danger- 
ous element of Southern population. This plan is distinctly outlined 
in the original scheme of Jefferson for the new educational organiza- 
tion of Virginia, and, had it been accepted, would have become the 
fashion of the day and saved the Eepublic of 1860 from the terrible 
conflict for the independence of the South. It was not remarkable that 
Jefferson shared in what was the almost universal moral repugnance to, 
and the deep conviction of the i^olitical inconsistency and social peril of 
such an institution as American negro slavery; but that he should have 
reached out and seized, as by instinct, on the idea of preparation, 
through industrial training, for the new life of the freedmau, whether 
at home or in Africa, declares him foremost among the educational 
theorists of his age. He would, see to-day his fundamental idea real- 
ized on a broader scale at Hampton, in sight of the landiug-jjlace of 
the first Dutch slaver, "built in the eclipse and rigged with curses 
dark," that smote with its fatal prow the sands of old Virginia. In the 
light of the opinions and feelings of Christendom at that day concern- 
ing the morale of slavery and the status of the Negro, probably stated 
with accuracy in the memorable sentence of the decision of Chief Jus- 
tice Taney in the Dred Scott case, illustrated by the persistent effort 
of the British Government to force African slavery on the American 
colonies, this enlightened and benevolent plan of Jefferson for the 
peaceful emancipation and i^reparation of the negro race for useful- 
ness is a striking j)roof of a statesmanship only too ideal for that early 
day. 

(3) Next came the first clear and influential statement of the right of 
the common white peoi)le of the South to elementary schooling at the 
exi^ense of the State, under the supervision of the Government, in Jef- 
ferson's proposition for a system of common schools. The hand-to- 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIKGINIA. 887 

moutli expedient of the " Old Field school," a private subscription 
arrangement, dependent entirely on the teacher and the whim of his 
patrons, possibly good but almost universally poor, was already seen 
to be a failure as a method for the permanent education of the majority 
of white youth. The proposition to limit the period of free schooling 
to three years and the small care for girls in the arrangement were 
concessions to the obstinate unbelief in any system of free public educa- 
tion ainong the influential classes of the people, backed by the universal 
l)reiudice of the clergy in favor of clerical supervision of all training of 
childhood and youth outside the family; itself, in this respect, little 
better than an annex to the church. One feature of the plan not fully 
appreciated was the appointment of teachers from worthy veterans of 
the Eevolutionary army during- good behavior and their establishment 
in a permanent home as a perquisite of the position, an arrangement 
that would have given to the teaching profession a standing of respect- 
ability and permanency it has not yet attained in the most favored sec- 
tions of the Union. At the same time Joseph Cabell, the Fidus Achates 
of Jefferson in all his educational schemes, returned from Euro])e full 
of the new method of instruction associated with the name of Pesta- 
lozzi. Had the scheme carried and been established in good faith the 
teachers of New England and the Northwest might have been throng- 
ing the normal schools and summer institutes of Virginia to-day for the 
latest methods and devices in the organization, discipline, and teaching 
of the common school. 

(4) The next step ui)ward was the conception of Jefferson respecting 
the secondary education, as far as concerned its establishment and 
supervision by the State. The germ of the idea included the modern 
American high school. In form it corresponded with what was then 
the universal conception of an academical training — the drill in the 
classics and mathematics as sufficient for a university and i^rofessional 
career, and the schooling essential to a gentleman. He proposed a 
system of colleges so numerous that every man in the State could reach 
one at the end of a day's journey, where the sons of the better-off' class 
could be instructed in the learning and manners essential to their sta- 
tion. But the plan included a provision for the free tuition of a few 
scholars in each county, elected by competitive examination from the 
common schools, thus reaching down a hand to lift up the more promis- 
ing boys of the humbler class to companionship in x^rivilege with their 
social superiors. Here the war was declared, fierce and persistent, by 
the clergy and the regulation planter of the day. Already had the 
prominent Christian bodies monopolized the higher education, even 
William and Mary being really a Church of England seminary, and 
the majority of the academies already established were regarded as 
feeders and mi.ssionary centers of the rival sects. On the other hand, 
the exclusive family idea of the time was outraged by a proposition to 
mix the offspring of even the different grades of upper-caste folk in 
schools removed from the home inspection and supervised by the State. 
No man realized better than Thomas Jefferson the essential antagonism 
of the family notion of exclusive edncation by tutors and governesses, 
virtually in an apartment of the home, without the independence of the 
teacher even in methods of instrnction, and its inevital)le enslavement 
to the habits and whims of a plantation household, to any genuine ideal 
of republican institutions. His voluminous writings on education are 
full of the clear perception of the right and duty of the whole people, 
represented in a republican state, to a vital cooperation in the mental 
and moral training of children and youth for rei^ublican citizenship. 



888 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

Otherwise tlie material of citizenship is always at the mercy of the 
church, and the church a clerical preserve. He asserted that, not 
only by a negative method of a legislation based on the highest con- 
ception of the moral law possible at any given period, and the protec- 
tive method of state guardianship of the child as a defense against 
])are]ital incapacity and vice and clerical persecution of heresy with all 
the agencies in possession of the clerical class, but also in the common, 
collegiate, and secondary state school, the moral right arm of the 
American commonwealth, was lodged this power and obligation. We 
are not yet out of the persistent war against this, the American idea 
of the training of American youth for Ameri(;an life. And no man of 
the earlier time so clearly anticipated this contlict, or so wisely pro- 
vided against the peril of social and sectarian interference with the 
liberty of becoming a full American citizen, as this great and farseeing 
statesman of education, 

5. Thus obstructed and worried even to the verge of desperation by 
the steady resistance of the old time family and clerical ideas of educa- 
tion, there is no wonder that Jetferson, at the end of a good fight of 
thirty years, in his old age, worn out by the cares of p^^blic office and 
the embarrassment of his own ]>rivate aft'iiirs, was ha]>py even to save 
the upl)er^tory of his great temple for thetrainijig of his beloved Virginia. 
It was indeed like the spire of a cathedral, poised in the air high above 
the earth, with no building underneath, propped by such stays and sup- 
ports as the unorganized school scheme of i)ri\"ate and church institu- 
tions could afford. As conceived in the imagination of its creator, the 
new University of Virginia was the broadest and most democratic ar- 
rangement for the higher education that had appeared on the new con- 
tinent. It had broken loose from the ecclesiastical control that still held 
all American colleges in bonds. It had inaugurated the elective system 
of study, which is now the acce])ted method of all leading colleges and 
universities in the country. As conceived in the mind of the sage, in 
his study over at Monticello, the idea of a comnninity of young gentle- 
men, i)ut upon their sense of personal responsibility and honor for good 
behavioV, was a new de])arture that struck down below the roots of the 
l)revailing notions of the discii)Uiie of youth for the obligations and 
Ijerils of life. His curriculum was almost the rival of Milton's noble 
conceiition of the education fit for an English gentleman, and included 
not only military tactics, but the industrial drill now coming to the 
front in the most progressive institutions of learning. 

So great were these and other lesser merits that, with all the draw- 
backs of its a(;tual organization, the University of Virginia has been 
one of the most influential of American seats of learning, setting the 
]utch for the entire organizati(ni of*the higher education in every State 
south of Virginia, and repeating itself, with the additions of Jefferson's 
entire scheme, in the State universities of every Northwestern and 
Pacific Commonwealth. Of course, under the conditions, it could not 
tViil to become a university of the dominant class, and, with the grow- 
ing tendency of that leading aristocracy, a citadel of the political and 
social ideas that drove the South into revolt from the National Govern- 
ment and wrought the dismemberment of the Old Dominion herself. 
But it has graduated a noble company of eminent men. Its standard 
of scholarship has been high, exacting severe labor from all who claim 
its Giploma. It has sent forth a gTeat crowd of accomplished teachers to 
thesecondary and higher schoolsof the Southwest,and largely modified 
' the coUegiatelifc of the older Northwest and, today, perhaps, no other edu- 
cational institution in these sixteen States has a better outlook for a new 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 889 

life alonj;- tlie lines of the new university departure. If the favorite 
notion of Dr. Euftner, that here should be established an annex for the 
higher education of young women, could be realized, a new departure 
of incalculable ini])i)rtance would be made in the quarter most demanded 
by the rising- ambition of thousands of the daiigliters of the State. 

But while the provision for the superior schooling of the more favored 
youth of Virginia was steadily increasing in quantity and qunlity 
through the torty years between 1820 and 18()0, the leading class of her 
people seem never to have recognized the dream of Jefi'erson for the 
common schooling of the common people. From time to time conven- 
tions were held. Intluential educational and public men like Henry 
A. Wise and numerous others uttered their warning and ])ersnadiiig 
plea for the bread of life, and more than one aborti\e attempt was made 
to establish in esi)ecial localities something that should take the i)laee 
of a commou school. But neither the lean and hungry arrangement for 
the schooling of the poor by the Literary Fund, nor the attempt at a 
county arrangement based on public taxation, made any gi-eat headway. 
Doubtless many of the children even of the poorer sort'of families were 
assisted by private charity and several generous public gifts to rise 
above the level of their companions. Tliere was an occasional ming- 
ling of all sorts and conditions in the great number of family, private, 
and Old-Field schools; and the academies for boys and girls were now 
and then invaded by ambitious youths, who, at all hazards, fought their 
way along the steep and rugged road that the American education was 
to the American boy and girl of half a century ago. But the condition 
of the educational destitution in which the State found itself in ISii."), in 
the hour of its dire extremity, was the logical result of the narrow Eng- 
lish i)olicy it had pursued in this as in other diiections; and, in 1670, 
the cry went up, from the sea sands to the most distant recesses of the 
western mountains, for the establishment of the American people's 
common school. 

In nothing has the really superior class of Virginia more notably 
declared its souTidness, persistence, and capacity to holdfast to a great 
idea than in the way in which it stood by the educational ideas of Jef- 
fei son through the one hundred turbulent years from the outbreak of 
the war of the Kevolution to the inauguration of the people's connnon 
school in 1870. Every now and then a desperate effort was made to 
break out of the fatal circle of the old-time family and church notion of 
the school. Kepeated conventions were held and some of the most 
brilliant and comprehensive pleas for universal education ever made 
were the e#orts of this agitation. Among them, the famous addi'essof 
the Hon. Henry A. Wise to his constituents in Accomack County on 
retiiing from his Congressional career, was conspicuous for its almost 
prophetic outlook into the future. His nephew is now the able super- 
intendent of common schools in the city of Baltimore. At last, the^ 
close of the civil war, in 18G5, first opened the way to the realization of 
the truly American scheme of the author of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and to-day, under modern forms and metliods, the essential 
ideas of this great educational statesnuin are imi^lanted in the consti- 
tution and laws and steadily becoming accepted facts in the new Do- 
minion. 

In sight of the old Hampton Beach, where the first slave ship dis- 
gorged its freight of black savages, on their way out of African bar- 
barism toward the lofty goal of American citizenship, now rises the- 
beautiful village called The Hampton Normal and Industrial Insti- 
tute. Established immediately after the advent of peace, by Gen. S. 



890 EDUCA'lION RFJ'ORT, 1890-91. 

C. Armstrong, the son of a missionary, a graduate of Williams Col- 
lege, Massachusetts, a young Union soldier and commander of colored 
troops, a remarkable blending of the statesman and scholar, it lias 
fully taken up Jefferson's plan of industrial training for the emanci- 
pated race and wrought it out with all the added experience of a hun- 
dred fruitful years. Not only has it profoundly interested the attention 
of tlie great wealthy Northeast, but it has become a part of the educa- 
tional system of the Stateof Virginia, which ])ays annuallyinto its treas- 
ury a portion of the income from the fund for the agricultural and me- 
chanical education of the people. And, as in further recollection of the 
old days, it now includes the training of one hundred youth of the Indian 
race, first met by the original settlers on this historic ground. An- 
other valuable school for the training of colored teachers now over- 
looks, from the towers of its stately buildings, the scene of the final 
conflict of the war of the sections, at Petersburg; while the State au- 
thorities every year are concerned in the management of the Sumner 
Institute of instruction for the same class of teachers. Sixty-eight 
thousand colored children are now receiving educational training, largely 
at the expense of the white people, in the common schools of the State. 

The college founded by Washington in Augusta County, beyond the 
mountains, received Gen. Robert E. Lee as president at the close of 
the war. In the reorganization of this venerable institution of learn- 
ing and its adjustment to the educational needs of the time. Gen. Lee 
displayed the same ability and vitality that made him the foremost 
military leader of the Confederacy. To day Washington and Lee, gen- 
erously endowed from both sections of the country, is one of the most 
substantial of the Southern colleges. 

The sou of one of the old presidents of Washington College, Dr. j 
Euffner, himself, before 1860, known all over the Union from a bold and 
powerful article on the institution of slavery, was wisely sele(;ted by the 
new State government to organize the system of common schools de- 
manded by the new constitution of the Commonwealth, and for twelve 
years Dr. W. H. Euffner administered the great office of first State 
commissioner of schools in Virginia in a way that made him the Horace 
j\Iann of the new South. The schoolman from abroad, who to-day sees 
how obstinately the old caste and sectarian spirit still resists tlie fit 
development of common schools established "• for the people and by 
the people,"' has but a faint impression of the prodigious task that con- 
fronted Dr. Euflher in 1870. Everywhere the old-time political, eccle- 
siastical, and social combination that had defeated Jefferson and kept 
the hated common school of the North out of the State for a. hundred 
years, rallied in the last ditch for a final trial of strength. That in the 
brief space of twelve years of official service this accomplished and 
courageous leader had so conducted the educational campaign that his 
displacement from offuje in 1882 left the system so firmly established in 
the hearts of the people of Virginia that neither the relentless opposi- 
tion of the defeated combination of its enemies, the fierce agitations of 
a new political administration, and, most dangerous of all, the fearful 
inadeipiacy of the schools themselves to do their proposed work, were 
able to discourage the educational public of the State, is conclusive 
l^roof of the success of this momentous achievement, for in this experi- 
ment was involved not only the establishment of the American common- 
school system in Virginia, but virtually in all the States of the South. 
Even to-day the State of Jefferson leads the educational column south 
of the Potomac and the Ohio, as in the years before the Hood. The 
final service of Dr. Euflher as first piesident of the first normal school 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWEbTEKN VIRGINIA. 891 

for wliite youth in the State was a fit conchision of his illustrious career. 
It may not be too much to demand tliat, in his later years, he shall 
publish a complete collection of his valuable olficial reports and his 
numerous writings in defense of the system of popular education which 
involved him iu controversy with some of the most eminent men ot the 
Connuon wealth. 

As a vital department of the new system he incorporated Jeffer- 
son's idea of the college in the form of the modern high school. 
He fully recognized the value of the industrial feature of educational 
life that now is so hapi)ily illustrated for white youth in the Miller 
Manual Labor School of Albemarle County, and in the Hamptou 
Agricultural and iNTormal Institute for the colored ])eople at Hamp- 
ton. His wise and politic organization of the common-school insti- 
tute in the summer of 1880, in the buildings and with the hearty 
cooperation of the faculty of the University of Virginia, was the 
linal victory which ended the long-time conflict of the upper side 
of the Old Dominion against the education of the masses at the expense 
and- under the supervision of the State. To-day the University of 
Virginia has not only at last assumed its legitimate position as the 
crown of the public-school system, but it now has a special provision 
for the instruction of teachers as a prominent feature of its revised 
curriculum. Old William and Mary College has arisen from its deca- 
dence and, with the normal training of young men as its most prominent 
feature, now numbers a larger body of students than in its most palmy 
days. Dr. Euftner was permitted to remain in office until he could say 
that a larger number of youth were attending schools of the second- 
ary and higher education in Virginia than at any former period of her 
history. 

In one respect it was given to this leader of the great educational 
movement in Virginia to surpass the ideal of Jefferson. A hundred 
years ago it was a social impossibility to urge the equal educational 
rights of the sexes anywhere in the American colonies. And nowhere 
was the old Euro])('an prejudice against the serious higher culture of 
young women held with greater tenacity than in the Old Dominion. 
The family tutor or governess, with the occasional accompaniment of 
a neigliborlutod private. school for girls only slowly evolved into the 
girls' academy, of which there were several well known institutions in 
the State before 1800; Hollins Institute for girls iu Botetourt County 
by far the best known and most effective. 

J>ut even with the increase of this feature of the educational outfit 
of the State, as late as 1885 Dr. Rutiner gave utterance, almost out of 
the bitterness of a hope long deferred, to words that bore testimony to 
tile strange neglect of public provision for the higher education of the 
daughters of a Commonwealth of all others most profuse in oratory 
and the devotion of the old-time habit of chivalry in behalf of woman. 
Said Dr. Kuffner, speaking of the Farmville Normal School for girls: 
"My vision is not confined to this school, or to any school. It is 
turned with anxious longing upon the entire body of Virginia Avomen. 
How strangely have they been neglected by the ruling sex. They are 
mixed through and through our social life; we love them as we love 
notliing else upon earth; they have an immeasurable power over us, 
they dictate our personal habits, they raise our children, they refine 
our tastes, they conserve our morals, they keep burning the fires of 
religion— everywhere in our daily life is found the skillful hand, ready 
mind, the quenchless heart of woman. And yet where has there ever 
been any public recognition of her inestimable claims upon society"? 



Sd2 EDUCATION EEPOET, 1890-91. 

Men make provision for their boys out of public funds and for them- 1 
selves too — duly conserving every interest they have; but how wretch- j 
edly small has been the share doled out to her who deserves every- ' 
thing. This is an injustice that will make our children ashamed of 
their fathers. But it is not only an injustice, it is an infatuation — an 
infatuation similar to that which kej»t down popular education generally 
in Virginia until a few years ago. The power residing in woman, if util- 
ized and directed, would give to society a life, a grace, a purity, a skill, 
a progre-ssiveness peculiarly its own, and the coming generation would 
receive a training in the homes, in the schools, in the social circles, in all 
the quiet but immeasurably potent centers and lines of inliuence such 
as 'can come from nowhere else. Behold what woman does now in a 
"state of neglect and try to imagisie what she could and would do if 
allowed the privilej^es which men have so liberally provided for them- 
selves. Do justice to the women of Virginia and every good thing- 
will be developed in the State." In an elaborate report devoted to the 
higher education of Virginia girls. Dr. Eutfner outlined the plan of an 
annex to the University of Virginia for young women, on the style of 
Girton and ifewman at Oxford, England. The only step yet taken in 
this direction is the opening of the free high school to girls and the 
establisliment of the excellent State TsTormal School at Farniville; both 
secured under the administration of its first State suijerintendeut of 
instruction. 

As a logical outcome of this great awakening of the educational 
spirit in Virginia, under the lead of Dr. Kuftner, there has been a 
remarkable time of refreshing for the higher education of the State. 
It has been a wise policy that has aided in the establishment of these 
rival colleges and concentrated the attention of the people on the 
rehabilitation and endowment of the half-dozen on the ground. Of 
these, the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, William and 
Mary, Hampden-Sidney, and Randolph Macon have been largely rein- 
forced by benefactions from beyond the limits of Virginia; in sonui 
cases, as in the gifts of McOormick, Austin, Brooks, Fayerweathei-, 
and Corcoran, to the university, and the generous contributions to 
Washington and Lee from the great cities of the Northeast, and the. 
more moderate donations to the remaining institutions, as the interest 
taken in Nf w England in one of the smallest of them, Roanoke College, 
the gift of money has seemed all the more precious as a testimonial of 
the pride and affection of the old Northeast and the new Northwest fur 
the mother of Presidents. 

There has been a remarkable development of academies for both 
sexes since 1805. Several of the most valuable fitting schools for the 
colleges and universities are of comparatively recent date. Staunton 
has a notable cluster of academies for girls, and everywhere, from 
Norfolk in the east to Bristol in the far west, this class of schools for 
the secondary training of young women is growing in numbers and in 
value. The State still waits ibr the establishment of a great school 
of technology in the mining region of the Shenandoah Valley and 
southwest. But within the present year the State Agricultural and 
Mechanical College at Blacksburg, on the summit level of the Common- 
wealth, has been reorganized in a fashion that promises a new career 
of enlarged useluliiess to this most imi)ortant feature in the higher 
education of a State so dependent on an energetic and progressive 
system of farming, mining, and manufactures. 

No State has more reason to regret the final defeat of the original 
movement for national aid to education, in 18*J0, than Viiginia. Out 



EDUCATION m SOUTHWESTERN VIEGINIA. 893 

of her magnificent bequest of public domain came the first great possi- 
bilities of the splendid policy of endowment of education by the gift of 
public lands that has given to the new Northw^est the prodigious im- 
petus in educational provision for its whole people. It was indeed an 
unaccountable thing that the bill was finally defeated by the votes of 
Senators of States whose schools are to-day munificently endowed by 
the bounty of their impoverished mother. It can not be that the coun- 
try will be forever unmindful of the claims of the old colonial division 
of the Eepublic that surrendered its vast western domain to the States 
beyond the Alleghanies, for aid in the prewsent home eflbrt to perform 
their duty to the coming generation. Especially do States like Mary- 
land, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, from which these great dona- 
tions of an imperial territory have taken place, deserve consideration. 
It will come when our partisan politicians rise to the comprehension 
of the fact that only what makes for the uplift of the younger third of 
the people can be relied upon to solve the great problems of finance, 
suffrage, race, even the perplexities of the involved labor and social re- 
forms. We may decide eacli and all these matters connected with the 
material, political, and social welfare of the Kepublic again and again, 
in our heated political campaigns, only to find them confronting us at 
the end of every session of Congress. But only as we educate the 
youth who are to receive the perilous heritage of constitutional govern- 
ment into a more intelligent, righteous, patriotic, and skilled executive 
way of living, will there be a reasonable hope of the final solution of 
problems so far above the capacity of the average politician of the day. 
Said Jeflerson, "Let us educate the children. Then the coming gen- 
eration Avill be wiser than we and many things impossible to us will be 
easy to them." 

Among the eminent records of Virginia statesmanship none is more 
significant than the twenty-first annual reportof the superintendent of 
public instruction of the Commonwealth of Virginia, with the accom- 
panyingdocuments, for the school year closing January 31, 1891. Fourth 
of the superintendents of public instruction since the inanguration of 
the American system of common schools in 1870, the Hon. Jno. E. Mas- 
sey may well feel an honest satisfaction in presenting to the country and 
to Christendom such a record of great achievement as the educational 
history of the New Dominion daring this brief generation. 

The most notable fact in this recoid is that, with the exception of 
three institutions for the higher education of boys, the medical school, 
and the institutions for the deaf, dumb, and blind, all partially depend- 
ent on State support and somewhat under State su])ervision, this entire 
group of edncational agencies is the growth of the past twenty-five 
years since the close of the civil war. The University of Virginia, the 
Virginia Military Institute, and the College of William and Mary, all, 
to-day, contain a larger number of students, with superior facilities for 
pr()])er collegiate work and more abun<lant resources, than at any pre- 
vious time. The recent establislnnents, the State Female Normal 
School for white girls, and the Viiginia Agricultural and Mechan- 
ical College for white youth; the Virginia Normal and Collegiate 
Institute tor colored youth; the Miller Manual Labor School of Albe- 
nuirle County for white boys and girls; the Hampton Normal and 
Agricultural Institute for negro and Indian studenis, and the normal 
d('i)artinent of William and Mary College for Mhite young men, are all 
the fruit of the movement that dates from this later period. In addi- 
tion to this, the State for the first time in its history has seriously 
responded to the high demand of JcfLerson for the free instruction of 



894 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

her entire i)opulation in a system of common schools, far more tliorougli 
and effective than was in the mind of any American educator at the 
close of the Revolutionary War. 

From the tables of this elaborate and interesting report we learn 
that in 1891 there were 112 counties and cities in Virginia under the 
superintendence of public officials appointed by the State board of edu- 
cation, consisting of the governor, attorney-general, superintendent of 
education, and the secretary of the board. The salaries of these super- 
intendents range from $2,110 in Eichmond, with four cities from $1,200 
to $1,370, to $200 as a minimum; .S2 of the 107 counties below $500; the 
remaining between $500 and $740, making $70,000 in round numbers for 
State and local supervision. Of the 652,045 children and youth of school 
age (6 to 21), 376,050 are white and 275,388 are colored. Of this num- 
ber, 342,720 were enrolled in the common schools — 219,141 white and 
123,579 colored— of whom 193,536—120,848 white and 66,688 colored- 
are in average daily attendance. Of the pupils enrolled 8,269 are 
studying the higher branches. The enrollment represents 52.5 per cent, 
and the average daily attendance 29.6 per cent of the entire school 
iwpulation of the State; the average age of the pupils is 10.8. The 
exactions of the new Southern life tell heavily on the youth of both 
races after the age of 12. There are 7,689 schools open (of which 1,017 
are graded), witli 5,710 white and 2,008 colored teachers — 3,000 male 
and 4,600 female. The average salaries of men are $31.40 and of 
women $26.66 per month. These schools are 0])en during an average 
period of 5.8 months per year, the long city and village offsetting the 
short country district term. The cost of tuition per month per pupil 
enrolled is 64 cents; $1.15 for actual attendance; The whole cost of 
popular education per month being 74 cents for number enrolled, and 
$1.32 for daily attendance — being $7.70 for the school year. The total 
cost of public education to the "State in 1891 was $1,636,982.84. Ol* 
this sum, $900,000 is supplied by the State and the remainder by 
county, district, and miscellaneous funds. Six thousand five hundred 
and nine schoolhouses represented an investment of $2,379,745.32, and 
had a seating capacity for 357,378 pupils. Of these, 147 are brick, 
4,050 frame, 79 stone, and 1,633 log; 5,943 have " suitable grounds." 
There is a steady though moderate increase in attendance every year 
and the superintendents generally report the groM'th of tlie common 
school in popular favor, with some improvements in school accommoda- 
tions and the efficiency of teachers, by far the most important feature 
in the estimate. Three normal institutes for the teachers of each race 
were held during the summer of 1890, the funds, $5,800, including $2,800 
for the instruction of students in the Peabody Normal College at Nash- 
ville, being donated by the Peabody educational fund. In addition to 
the cost of the public schools, the State disburses an annual sum of 
probably over $100,000 to the several higher institutions subsidized; 
besides the receipts of the agricultural and normal college fund donated 
by the General Government. 

It would be diflicult, if not impossible, to give even an approximate 
statement of tlie corresponding development of the academical and col- 
legiate institutions under private and denominational rehgious control 
in the twenty-five years since the close of the civil war. Every college 
in existence in 1860 has been sustained and, with perhaps one excep- 
tion, largely extended in facilities for instruction and attendance of 
students. No important academical foundation has been suspended, 
while nearly every school of this description lias been enlarged, and 
several of the most important have been founded during this time. Not 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 895 

the least in importance may be named several classical schools of siTpe- 
rior merit, tributary to the university, or furnishing an excellent outfit 
for collegiate life. The number of young persons sent to the ISTorth and 
to Europe for superior training has probably not diminished with the 
improvement of home facilities. Indeed, the more the home field is 
tilled the greater is the crop of eager youth seeking the best opportu- 
nities where they can be found. The writer of tliis essay, during a 
twelve-years observation of the higher education of all the Southwestern 
States of the Union, has noted the increasing number of teachers in 
higher institutions hailmg from Virginia. It would probably be safe 
to estimate the cost of public andpriv^ate education for the people of 
the Commonwealth for the current year at a sum not'less than $li,000,- 
000, ])robably more than that large sum, of which several hundred 
thousand dollars are paid for the free schooling of children whose 
parents were slaves in 1800. In view of the pessimistic estimate of the 
negro problem by some of the literary and political writers of the 
period, it is encouraging to turn to the elaborate and able report of 
Gen. S. C. Armstrong, president of the Hampton I^^ormal and Agricultu- 
ral Institute, in the matter referred to — a complete refutation of all the 
crude speculations emanating from the a priori theories and imperfect 
information of this entiie class of writers. A work already in the press 
of the Hampton Institute concerning the experience of this, the most 
careful and conservative body of workers in this new field of educa- 
tional effort, will l)e a great comfort to all who have not despaired of 
the side of the Kepublic represented by its 7,000,000 new-made citizens 
of African descent. 

While it is not true that this remarkable statement represents any- 
thing like a complete arrangement for the fit schooling of the 600,000 
children and youth of school age, and while the system of public edu- 
cation, even in the mii.jority of villages, and especially in the open 
country, where three fourths of the pupils live, is painfully below the 
needs of this great State; and while the educational critic finds much 
to condemn in the organization and administration of this department 
of the Government, and the chronic agitator can find enough to point 
his sarcasm or sharpen his denunciation, still, under the conditions of 
public and private life in Virginia during the past twenty-five years, 
this record is one of the most notable in the annals of mankind. JS'ever 
before since the dawn of history has a commonwealth so overwhelmed 
by the results of a disastrous civil war risen with such persistent deter- 
mination, "renewed its strength like the eagle's," and in one short and 
troubled generation ])laced itself in all ways so far in advance of any 
previous period of its history. And when we remember that the pres- 
ent year has brought the great relief of a final settlement of the finan- 
cial troubles of the State ; that in no year has there been such an invest- 
ment of capital from abroad in the deveiojmient of its resources; that 
from the seaboard to the western mountains the State is astir with 
the movement of a great expectation of material i)rosperity, only for a 
time checked by the usual excess of speculation in real estate, there 
is ample ground for the just hope of the days that are to come. During 
the most intense period of the civil war, in 1803, a devoted band of 
teachers in the city of Petersburg organized the first educational asso- 
ciation of Virginia. In the summer of 1891 this association, consisting 
of the male educators representing the higher education, was absorbed 
in a general State educational association founded at Bedford City, one 
of the new centers of industry and education in the southwest, including 
the public school interests, with many of the able and enthusiastic 
13II1 1' 



896 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

women teachers of the State in attendance and participatinj;^ in all its 
doinft's. The omens are all bright for an advance in the educational life 
of Virginia during the coming ten years, Avhich will not only keep the old 
Commonwealth where she has ahyays been, at the head of the South, 
but will place her in line with the great northern States. 

But just now the observer of this interesting feature in the develop- 
ment of new Virginia is especially attracted by that portion already 
referred to, the tweiity-five counties included in the soutliwest, extend- 
ing- from the new city of Roanoke to the borders of Tennessee, West 
Virginia, and North Carolina. A tour of several montlts through the 
most iuteresring portion of this district has furnished the materiAlsfor 
tlie present essay on education in southwestern Virginia. Tliere is no 
pretense that this estimate is comprehensive in its details; neither does 
the writer attempt to declare the complete value of schools or pass 
judgment on the educational merit or demerit of the different towns 
and cities of the region. Enough if such a statement as he is able to 
make, after honest and persistent attempts to reach the truth of the 
matter, can exhibit to the i^eople, especially to the generous youth of 
this favored land, the opportunities, invitations, and reasonable expec- 
tations of the coming years. It is largely with the view of giving- to 
the youth of this region the conclusions of a friendly observer, after 
walking about their Zion, that the present essay is dedicated to them, 
their teachers, and the friends of universal education in Virginia. 

The reasonable foundation of the great expectations of Virginia, as 
of the entire South, is the vast reserve of material resources in every 
Southern State. In this respect the oldest of the sisterhood of the six- 
teen former slave-holding Commonwealths is notably among the fore- 
most. After the exhaustion of a portion of her old eastern fields by a 
culture of nearly three hundred years and the latest dismemberment of 
her territory, there still remains as the Virginia of to-day a realm larger 
in extent than some of the historical nations of Europe, and this por- 
tion is as essentiall V " a new country " as some of the recently admitted 
States of the Northwest. 

From the city of Roanoke, Roanoke County, which in five years has 
risen from a railroad station to a nourishing city of 20,000 people, 
stretching away to the southwest, with a narrow annex to the north 
and south, are found the twenty-five counties in general terms known 
as southwestern Virginia. In comparison with the State of Massachu- 
setts, most eminent for wealth, general prosperity, and the influence 
that depends on intelligent industry, this region includes 14,000 square 
miles as against 8,000 in the Bay State. In all except the possession 
of 50 miles of seacoast, with two or three harbors of the first class, 
southwestern Virginia in every respect may claim an unquestioned su- 
periority in the natural resources for the building of a great common- 
wealth. In its large areas of feitile soil for variety of crop culture and 
extensive grazing, with skilled farming adequate to the support of a 
larger population than now inhabits any Ameiican State; in its mar- 
velous wealth of coal and iron and other valuable minerals; in its 
boundless forests of precious woods; in its abundance of water power; 
in its climate, by all odds the most favorable of any southern and not 
inferior to any American commonwealth; in its peculiar felicity of geo- 
grapical situation, at the meeting of the ways of the grejit North and 
Southwest and the Northeast; in its occupation for one hundred years 
by a population of the best original European stock, the plain Britisli peo- 
ple and theGermansof the Lutheran sort, now representing 400,000 of 
theljCOOjOOO people of the State, with its small colored contingent, as in 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIEGINIA. 897 

the West, chiefly gatliered in the villag-es and new centers of develop- 
ment, witli only the later iuinii<4rantpopnlation recently called in by the 
rai)id development of the mining and mannfactnring districts; already 
connected with the adjacent parts of tlie laiu^n by iin]>ortant lines of 
railroads, which are stretching out their arms of isteol into every cor- 
ner of its territory; not inferior in picture>qne beanty and grandeur of 
alternating mountain range, valley, hill, ancl fertile "cove," to any por- 
tion of the coniitry east of the Mississipi^i; here is an outtit of nature 
and a favorable condition of human affairs that ex])lains the fact that 
to-day the eye of the capitalist at home and abroad is concentrated on 
this favored land as upon no other portion of the Kepublic. 

And here is found, in connection with all the sul)stantial advantages 
of a new country, the historical background, the lack of which is a real 
disadvantage in the vast unoccupied wilderness beyond the mountains. 
For a hundred years this 14,000 s(piare miles of the Old Dominion has 
been slowly prei)ared for the great day of its appearance on the stage 
of the new American era of improvement. From the first, the vast 
majority of these iieople have been farmers, in moderate circumstances, 
living according to tiie slow, obscure ways of the rural American of 
half a century ago. The few great plantations of the valleys absorbed 
the slave interest and, outside of an inevitable leadership iu public 
and social life, this class did not essentially affect the life of the plain 
people. The more restless spirits were drawn off" by the settlement of 
the new southwest. The country beyond the mountains, now known 
as West Virgiuia, remained for many years rather a portion of the new 
northwest than of the old Virginia of the seaboard. Between these 
rival interests that finally divided the State, this important region 
remained, biding its time for development. 

Already, by the enterprising ])o]icy of its great railroad and land com- 
panies, it is being better sup])!ied with good iiotel accomniodations than 
any portion of the South. The great southwest is drifting thither as 
the most attractive summer home, and every week sees a large excur- 
sion train, filled with the restless pleasure seekers of the luxurious 
eastern cities, seeknjg "fresh fields and pastures new" for the stimu- 
lants of an appetite for novelty, satiated and gorged by European travel 
and the laborious vacation life of the seashore and huge centers of met- 
ropolitan resort. The poi)ulation left on the soil, after the steady drain 
of the past twenty-five years to the far West and Southwest and the 
eastern cities, is perhai)s in the best condition for the developing forces 
of the new American civilization through all their various agencies of 
popular stimulation and culture. In public affairs it can hardly be 
called a vital part of the " Solid South " orofa rival consolidated North, 
being conspicuous for a political independence which has more than 
once given it a decisive voice in the affairs of the State; though in 
accord with the Confederacy during the Civil war, its territory was 
largely exempt from the ravages of the great conflict; especially was 
it saved from the terrible strife of divided tactions which has inflicted 
on the entire border land, from Virginia to Kansas, a chronic habit of 
local exasperation and political bitterness that only a coming genera- 
tion can outlive. Nowhere in the South is there to-day a people more 
truly patriotic and nowhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia are the 
noble historic traditions of the Old Dominion in behalf of liberty and 
union more firmly and obstinately cherished. 

It is Just this condition of affairs that makes the recent great invest- 
ment of capital from the North and from Europe so important to the 
future of this region. Southwest Virginia is not an Eldorado whose 



898 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

'' booming" attractions invite ttie fierce, reckless, and unreliable adven- 
turer from all parts of tlie eai tb. It is not a country that is to be over- 
flowed by any rapid immigration from borne or abroad. Its present 
I)opulation is of the substantial quality that, when once fully awakened to 
the importance of what is going on in its midst, will straightway prepare 
the coming generation to join hands with the new life, and in due time 
come into possession of all the substantial opportunities and successes 
of a new era. And herein is a great advantage, not always appreciated, 
especially by the people of the North, in the social, political, religi(ms, 
and educational development of the New fc>outh. The enthusiastic 
expectations of the early days of reconstruction that the South was to be 
made over by a vast camiiaign of education into an annex of the vic- 
torious North, has long since become the " baseless fabric of a vision, 
leaving not a wrack behind." No American State, county, or neighbor- 
hood can or ought to be overrun by the superiority of a neighboring 
people, or its characteristics stamped out, even by missionary zeal for 
higher things. Oidy by the gradual, irresistible progress of universal 
education of the American type, the slow and sure training of the 
heart, the head, and the hand of the younger generation, by the hearty 
cooi)eration and sympathy of all corresponding States and sections, can 
a reliable growth into the higher American citizenship be secured. 
Whatever is otherwise attem])ted, with prospects however brilliant, 
inevitably comes to a fatal collision with an awakened and exasperated 
'local sentiment, leaving " the last state worse than the first." 

Here is just the happy adjustment of social forces needed to make the 
new Virginia of the Southwest an object lesson in the true readjustment 
of American society in the South. The great investment of capital that 
is now opening the mines, building newtowns, carrying newrailroads like 
si)ider webs of steel and iron ail over this wonderland, is not a hostile 
influence working for the dispossession of the home proprietor. The 
inevitable collapse of the real estate boom with which the country is 
now somewhat depressed is only the reaction of an overexcited move- 
ment, and will be a healthy warning rather than a permanent backset 
to the country. Within twenty years, probably sooner, southwestern 
Virginia, with anything like a judicious management of its industrial 
opportunities, will offer to its ambitious and active young men and 
women such chances of industrial success as have never been known 
in any portion of the South from the beginning. In the mine, on the 
farm, in the development of all varieties of manufoctures, in the count- 
ing room, at the teacher's desk, in the call for a superior clergy and a 
higher type of commercial and political talent — in all the characteris- 
tic American avenues of occupation, there will be a call tliat will bring 
the home people into the most intimate connection with the leaders of 
these great enterprises. Eighty per cent of the men worth $100,000 
to-day in the United States were the poor American boys of a genera- 
tion ago, and more than 80 per cent of the women who are the true 
"first 400" of every community are recruits from the same great Ameri- 
can hive. There is no good reason why in half a century the descend- 
ants of the southwestern Virginia people of this decade should not 
become the virtual possessors of the plant now being made on the soil 
and come into most intimate connection with the substantial people 
coming to this promised land. Certain it is that, whatever may be the 
theories of any party of reaction, the Virginia of the year of our Lord 
1S92 is "lifting its eyes unto the hills" of its oMm southwest with a 
mighty faith that in '-God's country" beyond the Blue liidge, the 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 899 

splendi^l valley of the Slienaiidoah, and the New Southwest, will be 
found its strength for the coniiii<i' nioineutous years. 

It will be well if this tact is s])eedily recognized by the present pop- 
ulation of this ])ortion of the old Commonwealth as the inevitable con- 
dition of the best possible success. It will be " as easy as preaching" 
to i)lant in every valley of southwestern Virginia a little "hell-town," 
representing- the worst features of the worst form of human degrada- 
tion, in an ignorant, reckless, brutal laboring population — a hideous 
stew of all races, nationalities, and undesirable home folk — in chronic 
conflict with a grasping, materialistic moneyed aristocracy, bent only 
on working the land for all it is worth. Already is this to be seen in 
more than one of this sudden growth of towns, sprung up in the night 
into a hideous apparition that defies the savagery of the wildest monn- 
tain clan. It is not pretended that a great region like this, under the 
present stimulation of sudden material development, wili of itself 
evolve into a social paradise or in any way become anything good which 
the foremost people within its borders do not insist on its becoming. 
The boom that is now rushing down the valleys of Virginia and Ten- 
nessee is the sauje old boom that in turn has excited every land, in 
every age, with brilliant prophecy of the milleuium. The wisest word 
yet spoken concerning the develo]unent of an American city or region 
was the response of Mr. Jay Gould, two years ago, to a group of inter- 
viewers, to the effect that the great cities and favored regions of the 
earth Avere not the inevitable outgrowth of great natural resources, 
favorable clinuite, or geographical i)Osition, but were built up on the 
solid foundations of personal character, social refinement, religious and 
educational enterprise, and a good home life of the better class of the 
l)opulation. Here is the bottom fact in this, as in every portion of our 
great Republic, newly awakened to fev^erish activity and compelled to 
XJOse as the last " bonanza land" before the superior public opinion of 
Christendom. No vulgar, vicious, ignorant people anywhere in the 
United States of America, swollen with the conceit of its own superi- 
ority to the rest of manki)id, inviting the stranger to the admiration of 
a provincial type of life, is to be lilted into im[)ortance by any advan- 
tage of climate, soil, wealth of mine, or other physical superiority. Oidy 
that country which recognizes in its material advantages a call of 
Providence to rise up and adjust itself to the foremost life of this 
"grand and awful time" in which we live and move will find an out- 
come from final wreckage in the most flattering prospect of the future. 
To the thoughtful observer, as he looks out from the Avindows of that 
real progress which means the superiority of man over all his environ- 
ments and the control of all his surroundings by the power of a Christian 
civilization, the southwestern Virginia of to-day presents one of the 
most interesting problems of American society. It stands at the part- 
ing of the ways, and the few swift-coming years will determine wliether 
this inevitable material prospeiity shall be the angel going before or 
the demon spurring from behind. It is with this profound conviction 
that we have studied the present educational status of these twenty- 
five counties of the southwest; not in the mood of an educational 
critic, but with the hopeful spirit of a "ministry of education" which 
prays for a revival — that uplift of a whole people toward the higher 
life which is the prophecy of a Christian civilization as the ruling force 
in national affairs. 

From the accessible records of the educational life of this region pre- 
vious to IStiO, it is evident that it was in every way the least-favored 
portion of the Virginia of that day. The great educational opportuni- 



900 EDUCATION EEPORT, 1890-91. 

ties of the State for twolmndrerl and fifty years have been monopolized 
by the favored pUintatiou chiss beyond the eastern monntnins. The 
Virginia "out West," now West Virginia, was gaining by contact with 
the new and vigorous Northwest. Here, in the middle country, par- 
tially isolated from the great world of which it is really the geograph- 
ical center, the opportunities for good schooling for the masvses were 
nu^ager and unsatisfactory. The "old-lield school" was one of the 
makeshifts of the pioneer civilization that was good or bad according 
to the master of ceremonies. The most enlightening account of tliese 
pioneer arrangements is found in a remarkable series of historical mem- 
oranda, called out in the first year's service of the Hon. E. 1\. Farr as 
State superintendent of instruction, in 1885, at a superintendents' con- 
ference held in Kichmond in February of that year. A majority of 
the county and local superintendents of common schools presented 
there a remarkable series of reports concerning the early status of edu- 
cation in their districts. While, as a whole, these brief monographs 
bear new testimony to the exceeding difficulty of gathering up reliable 
statistics by hearsay and often highly colored reports concerning the 
real condition of education and the actual illiteracy of the popidation, 
yet enough was produced to make a vivid presentation of the difficul- 
ties that beset the youth of large regions of the Old Dominion, even at 
a late day, in this respect. The field school was generally a private- 
subscri])tion term of schooling, built up by the eflbrts of a master and 
a few of the more earnest patrons, held in the most available building, 
often of a very primitive character; the school itself dejtending entirely 
on the quality of the teacher. What the average quality was can be 
found out by a perusal of these interesting reminiscences. Espe(;ially 
m these twenty-five counties, the majority of which are distant from the 
old educational centers of the State, sj^arsely populated, formeily some- 
what out of touch with the great intlueiitial classes of tlxQ Common- 
wealth, were these opportunities, even for a large majority of the peo- 
])le, very scanty. A better sort of schools were the privileged groups 
of children of the more favored families, taught by superior teachers, 
often in the homes of the leading patrons. The entire region contained 
but two institutions fairly entitled to the name of college, and these 
for boys — Eoanoke College, at Salem, then in its early struggle for 
existence, and farther to the southwest, Emory and Henry, which for 
a nimiber of years was a great power for the training of clergymen, 
teachers, and public men to the entire southwest. A small number of 
academies for girls date back to this early era. These were chiefly of 
a denomiiiational Christian ty]ie, very largely an annex to the sect on 
which the school chiefly depended for support. Indeed, we must look 
to the superior clergy and the more enlightened and vigorous of the 
religious sects for the chief influence in the development of the second- 
ary and higher education here, as in all portions of the South, in that 
early day. On the border, between the ola Virginia of the east and 
the great southwest, Hollins Institute was for many years conspicuous. 
Begun by a clergyman from the North as a normal school for the train- 
ing of teachers, it happily fell under the control of Dr. Cocke, who, 
still, after a generation of good service, maintains it as one of the best 
schools for girls in all the Southland. Farther down, at Christians- 
burg, Marion, Wytheville, Abingdon, Bristol, and other places less con- 
spicuous, were academies for boys and girls, all reliable institutions 
for their day, all the fruit of sacrifices and toils by men like Rev. Creed 
Fulton and his contemporaries, wliose labors are the noblest educa- 
tioual heritage of this locality. A considerable number of the leading 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 901 

instructors in tliis section were drawn from tlie Northeast, which, until 
the Uiter alienation of the sections forbade, was the hive from which great 
numbers of toacliers in all sorts of schools were drawn. 

It is not our purpose to attempt a picture of the educational condition 
of this region duiing the past seventy-five years of its settlement, even 
until the bi caking out of the civil wai'. It would be iuipossible to draw 
a p cture that M'ould be satisfactory to the vigilant home critic of all 
Southern histoiy written to date. The materials do not exist for a 
presentation that wdl be acce])ted as just by anybody. Probably the 
brief reports of the one hundied superintendents of common schools in 
1885 at e as near as is possible to come to the facts of the case, and these 
are accessible in the report of the State superintendent of education 
for that year. 

But whatever may have been the deficiency of popular culture to 
this date, ail accounts report the state of education immediately fol- 
lowing the close of the war as sufhciently depiessed to excite the 
giavest apprehension. Fiom 18(35 to 1870 was everywhere in the 
South d season of ijrostration. alternating with fierce outbieaks of local 
resistance to the national miLtaiy lule. Whle attempts weie nrnde 
to revive the old time field subscription schools, and academies and 
colleges weie resuming their activity, st 11 all beside the favored few 
weie m a condition that made the use of these education'al advantages 
impossible. It Avas not until 1870, when the American system of 
common schools for the first time was introduced into the oldest 
Ameiicau Commonwealth, that a vast majority of the people of this 
great region had a fair oppoitunity to give to their children even the 
small elementary schooling that is stiil the meager pittance accoided 
to the majority of Southern children to-day. 

But we shall greatly misjudge this section of the Southern white peo- 
ple if we ini'er that this prevailing illiteracy in the knowledge and use 
of books iuii)lied a fatal lack in education. Here is the rock on wdiich 
so many of our university men and educational experts to-day are 
aground — the comparison of European ami American youth on exclu- 
sively literary lines. It may be, as President Eliot is fond of telling us, 
that the French or German boy of 16 knows his Latin grammar and 
some other portions of the school curriculum more thoroughly than our 
own. The American boy, meanwhile, has been a close and eager student 
in the greatest university of all the ages, thenew American life. At 18 he 
knows more of what he must do and be as a man than the average Euro- 
pean man knows or can know under the existing conditions of his outdoor 
life. While we must insist on the increasing thoroughness and cor- 
rectness of our school work for all classes and conditions of our peo- 
ple, we need not forget that the special merit of republican institutions 
is their educational power over the citizen from the cradle to the 
grave. 

No portion of the American people from the beginning has so profited 
by the experiences and opportunities of this national university of the 
common American life as the class we sometimes call " the third es- 
tate of the South;" the nonslaveholding, plain people, who in 1860 
constituted an overwhelming nmjority of the white population of these 
sixteen Southern States. No section of American history could be woven 
into a story of the making of a republic more thrilling in incident, more 
instructive to the social philosopher or historian, than the true story of 
the rise and growth of this portion of the so^^thern white i)opulation, 
from its earliest ajJijearance upon tlie Atlantic seaboard south until 



002 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

its last uprising in the Farmers' Alliance of the present decade. At 
first it was the most adventurous and independent class of the south- 
ern country; the least satisfied with the high aristocratic complexion of 
the Old Dominion by the sea. It pushed through the gaps of the nearer 
mountains, forced back the line of savage warfare in the decisive 
battle of Point Pleasant, broke the power of the Indian, and, under 
the lead of Col. George Washington, cleared the country of the French- 
man and his brutal allies, even before the Revolution. There has rarely 
been a more capable set of men than the better class of the early immi- 
grants to southwestern Virginia. The records of the half century before 
the Revolutionary war abound with the exploits of this courageous, 
all-enduring, and powerful people — the makers of Kentucky, Tennessee, 
and the new Southwest. lu their way they were a body of religious, 
moral, and solid colonists of a new country whose perils and hardships 
already imparted to their stern and decisive character a strain of feroc- 
ity and almost barbarism in their dealings with the " noble savage," 
of whose nobility they had no high estimation. The admirable series 
of volumes by Edmund Kirke (Mr. Gilmore), on the early settlement 
of Tennessee," with the brilliant sketch of the environment of Andrew 
Jackson by James Parton, and the growing literature of this interesting 
portion of the old repul)lic, furnish an illuminating picture of these 
times and men. It is significant that the three older Presidents of the 
United States — best known through Christendom — Washington, Jack- 
son, and Lincoln — were all, to a great extent, educated by the pioneer life 
of this time and this region, and the present Chief Magistrate of the 
United States, Benjamin Harrison, is the descendant of his grand- 
father, whose big hat covered a head trained in the same stringent 
school. While Washington, with the assembled forces of the eastern 
colonies, was holding the British empire at bay from Boston to Savan- 
nah, Lewis, Sevier, and their partisan associates of the backwoods 
were achieving the equally important and more trying conquest of the 
wild West and clearing the land of the British occupancy. And later 
it was the ominous cloud of southwestern rifiemeu, hovering on the hori- 
zon of the vast French empire of the Southwest, that made Napoleon, 
shrewdest of imperial politicians, sell out the territory now represented 
by a domain of twenty great American Commonwealths. Later yet, 
the same rough-and-ready army followed the heels of Jackson in clear- 
ing the country to the Gulf of Indian occupation; the climax of that 
remarkable series of campaigns being the memorable battle of New 
Orleans. Still later, a group of the same sort of people were the ma- 
jority of the advanced guard of American life that swarmed into Texas 
and, under the lead of a Tennessee President, forced the Mexican war, 
which gave to the country the spleiulid Pacific realm, itself one of the 
noblest empires on the face of the earth. 

The civil war was the fit climax of this campaign of the Southwest of 
a hundred years in bringing this portion of the Republic, consisting of 
the old Orange County of Virginia in 1030, to the front. There is no 
doubt that nine-tenths of the nonslaveholding i^opulation of this region 
of West Virginia, North Carolina, eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, 
northern Georgia and Ala,baina, western Arkansas, and southern Mis- 
souri were as thoroughly opposed to the great secession movement of 
1861 as the people of New England. The revolt in the east at once 
separated from Virginia the territory now known as the progressive 
State of West Virginia. It rallied the mountain population to the 
defense of the Union, and 140,000 white soldiers, a greater army than 
Washington ever commanded, shouldered arms and followed the old 



EDUCATION IN SOUTIIWESTERN VIRGINIA. o03 

flii^" to the end. The bitter end of the civil war w;is felt by these 
i;,UO(»,000 peo])le in the central section of the United States where the 
warfare of armies was sni)i)leniented by the terrible striie ol' rival fami- 
lies, fatheis and sons, mothers and daughters, schools and churches, 
of which the wounds are not healed even to this day. Here, during 
these tremendous years from 18G0 to 1S70, was a training school of 
manhood and womanhood even in the region least disturbed by the 
outward conflict of armies, the twenty-live counties now known as 
southwestern Virginia. To .speak of such a people, so drilled, tutored, 
and trained in the great university of the pioneer American life for a 
whole century as uneducated is a misuse of terms. And beyond this 
stringent and varied discipline of actual life these jieople were further 
educated by the original method of all civilized nations. The "plain 
speaking" in the pulpit and on the stump of tftfs end of the old South- 
ern life has forced its way from the mountain region of the central 
South (lut into the free West, east of the Blue Kidge, into the very 
heart of the culture of the fastidious Northeast. The old-time high- 
soaring oratory of the educated Southern States, and the concentrated 
discourse of the corresponding class in the Northeast, have both "paled 
their ineftectnal tires" before the direct, powerful, home-dealing talk of 
the Southwestern pioneer. The coming type of eloquence in the 
Kepublic is based on this, the most effective met^hod yet found of moving 
men, women, and children to great deeds and to progressive thinking. 
So out o'f this object-lesson of the American life, annotated and punc- 
tuated by the public and private conditions of the Southwestern pioneer 
American civilization, did this people of which we waite get a prepara- 
tion for the first common school of the masses and the reconstruction 
of the old-time academical and collegiate training of the more favored, 
which makes what we now call the new education of the new South. 

Never was the hand of Providence more visibly stretched forth in 
our American life than in the call of Horace Mann, in 1835, to lead the 
hrst reconstruction of the old time New England district, country, and 
village school into the present graded common-school system of the 
United States. Of equal signiticance and no less i^otentin its outcome 
was the appointment of Dr. \\'illiam H. Euffner to the difficult pioneer 
position of State superintemient of education in Virginia, thirty-five 
years later, in 1870. Of all the States of the Union, i)erhaps, Virginia 
was the least disposed, n]) to this date, to adopt tlie common-school 
system of the Northern States of the Union. Only by a careful study 
of the educational situation, even at the close of the war, when the 
leading class was left alnmst destitute of the means to educate their 
children in the old-time exclusive way, can we obtain a true insight 
into the difficult position occupied by the new superintendent, and 
especially by the subordinate local supervisors of the new school system, 
almost forced upon the people. It probably was fortunate, that at the 
beginning supreme power was lodged in the State board of education, 
l^ractically in the State superintendent, to appoint every local, county, 
and city superintendent of coriimon schools in the Connnonwealth. In 
this way Dr. Kulfuer was able to place his hand on a body of men who 
believed in the new^ regime and could be trusted for some reasonable 
effort to make the new school system a reality. 

The history of the introduction of the new common school system 
into southwestern Virginia reads like a romance in the brief records of 
the superintendents of the twenty-five counties now under observation. 
All paint in almost tragic colors tlie disadvantages under which the 
mass of the white people labored up to the time of the inauguration of 



904 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

the new arrangements. Says one: " Not one in live of the '^hole popu- 
lation was possessed of the rudiments of an education." Says another: 
"The log schoolhouses, few and far between, scattered here and there, 
would tell a sad tale of ignorance to the masses and culture only to the 
few." Another says : " Previous to 18G0 five great families held nearly 
the entire fertile portion of our county. They divided society into two 
classes, Virginia gentlemea and slaves; the poor dependent whites 
occupying a j^osition like the grain Detween the two millstones." Still 
another declares: "The records of this antebellnm time are written in 
the ignorance of the masses of the people." Still another: " Education 
acquired by means of public money was considered an arrangement for 
paupers only." The first superintendent of one of these counties writes, 
on giving up his office to his successor: "I have so far ruled for good 
morals in the case of applicants for certificates as teachers as to send 
none to trustees for employment who use profane language, drink 
drams, gamble, dance, or are otherwise of questionable character." 
Well might the suiierintendent of Washington County write in 1885: 
" The new common-school system was incorporated into our organic law 
by a convention comi:)osed of members many of whom were considered 
as not at all in sympathy with a large and hitherto influential class of 
our people. The whole movement was new and, in many features, con- 
trary to all our cherished notions and hereditary traditions. Its ene- 
mies predicted that the system would of itself fall to i)ieces in a short 
time and be buried out of siglit never to be resurrected. The opposi- 
tion and distrust were decidedly outsi)oken in this county for several 
years — in some neighborhoods perhaps more than others. The impro- 
vised houses were a ie])roach to the name of school. The teachers were 
often without any especial fitness for their calling, since the better class 
were unwilling to engage in a free school. The State, however, had 
been fortunate in its selection of a man to put the machinery in mo- 
tion who was heart and soul in the work, who was a true believer in 
free schools and who, by his energy, wisdom, and unsurpassed tact, at 
length lifted the despised system from its low estate to great useful- 
ness. He laid foundations broad and deep, upon which has been built 
up the magnificent structure which bids fair to be the State's chief 
glory and the iieople's gn^atest benefaction." 

But not even the high qualities and burning zeal of the eminent State 
superintendent could have won the victory had not the soil of this cor- 
ner of the Old Dominion been prepared for the great awakening in 
behalf of the children. Of course, the new sj'stem was opposed by 
all the forces of the old regime, too often by those who were to become 
its most generous benefactors and most ardent friends. Poverty in 
the masses, class prejudice, sectarian bigotry disguised as zeal for 
Christian education, the deeply-rooted prejudice against the pauper 
free school of the old day, somewhat the sectional Jealousy against 
everything coming from the victorious Korth, the greed of avarice — all 
these and other considerations only less powerful were enlisted against 
the new departure. But it is interesting to note how, in the fifteen 
years before this report of progress, these barriers had been so largely 
burned away and the common school, in theory at least, had been gen- 
erally adopted throughout this portion of the State. In fact, some of 
the mountain counties took to it at once with a vigor and zest that 
shamed the more cultivated section of the Commonwealth. Superin- 
tendent Rufiner holds up Grayson County, ])erclied upon the plateau of 
the Blue liidge, to the admiration of the State. " In the first year," he 
says, " it had started forty-two schools, being excelled by only seven of 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 905 

the more populous and more favorably situated counties of the State; 
and even these seven counties were excelled in enrollment. Grayson, 
rough and mountainous, with her snows and hard winters, enrolled Q6 
per cent of her school population (6 to lil) the tirst year, thus Icjiding- 
every county in the State in this respect." In 1885 every county super- 
intendent in this portion of the State was able to report a most grati- 
fying- advance in the popular interest in education, an improvement in 
school buildings, gain in teachers, and increasing attendance of chil- 
dren. The chief impediment to an immediate and eminent success was 
the chronic Southern ditticulty of the lack of funds to put on the ground, 
a system so expensive as the free schooling of the whole people. Thou- 
sands of children here and through the Southland were and still are 
kept away from the new^ schools by the distance, difiSculty of regular 
attendance, especially through the winter, nnfit clothing, exposure in 
unsuitable buildings; sometimes by the unworthiness of such teachers 
as can be had at from $liO to $50 per month for the three or four mouths 
of the scliool year. 

It is a sutticient answer to the assertion of the ISTorthern enemies of 
the Blair bill that, with scarcely an exception, the one hundred city and 
county supeiintendents of Virginia in 1885 presented the ho])e of 
national aid of education as the great expectation and reliance of the 
people. The first long delay of this beneficent measure and its final 
defeat in 1891 have been among the most potent causes of hope de- 
ferred, deepening almost to despair, concerning an effective system of 
popular education, observed by the writer of this essay as a present 
sentiment among the friends of good schooling in this ])ortion of the 
State. Another backset has undoubtedly been the involving of the 
school system in the hotly contested i^artisan politics of the Common- 
wealth since 1880. The solemn warnings of Dr. liuffner against this, 
one of the most fatal of tlie group of children's diseases that invariably 
infest any new system of ]^o])ular education, were unheeded. This great 
leader of the i:)eo[)le was deposed after a term almost as long as that of 
Horace Mann, and the ax of political decai)itation, placed in the hands 
of the State board, has henceforth been wielded in the usual American 
partisan political way. But so firmly had the system been founded in 
the hearts of the people during the preceding period, and every new 
State superintendent and probably a majority of the local superintend- 
ents had been so inspired or swe])t along by a decisive and progressive 
public 0])inion, that the connnon school of the Virginia of today in 
some ways is the advance guard of universal education in the South, 
and, with all its infirmities, was never in so good a condition to take 
the field for the final overcoming of illiteracy as in tlie present year. 
The vigorous way in which the city of Lyncliburg, on the border of this 
section of the State, took up the new system from the first, and made 
itself one of the foremost of Southern cities in the excellency of its 
schools; and the zeal with which its efficient superintendents have 
wrought in tlie home work and its present chief official in the new insti- 
tute work of this portion of the Commonwealth, have been powerful 
influences in the success of the movement. 

There is no educational problem of more commanding interest in the 
sixteen Southern States to-day than the thorough organization of the 
educational interest in these twenty-five counties, grouped in this essay 
as southwestern Virginia. With a present population of 400,000, 
90 per cent of the native white stock from which have been going forth 
for a hundred years the most valuable pioneers of the Southv/est, 
overburdened neither with the lower colored nor recently imported 



006 EDTICATION REPOET, 1890-91. 

European contingent, there would seem to be no good reason why this 
favored realm of all the Southland should not become, in time, tlie 
most vital end of the old Comusonwealth, and in connection with East 
Tennessee and the adjacent highland region, the most prosperous and 
influential portion of the old central Southern dominion. A tour, in 
1892, of several months through the valley region of this country, with 
unusual opi)ortunities of obtaining information concerning the present 
status of educational affairs, both in the towns and through the open 
country, has only confirmed the growing impression of the twelve years 
of our ministry of education in the South, that here, just now, is the 
providential soil to put in seed of the best quality and the most gen- 
erous quantity for an abundant harvest in the near future. 

The problem in this region, broadly stated, is, How can the present 
generation of children and youth in this portion of Virginia, at least 
50,000 between the ages of and 14 and near 100,000 of legal school 
age, be given the opportunities of good schooling and self-improvement 
which will bring them out abreast of the demands which their own 
home country will make upon every competent young man and woman 
within the next ten or fifteen years? At present I see that the inevi- 
table drift of the more ambitious young men from the rural districts 
toward the new towns and the more progressive regions of their States 
has well begun. The county su])erintendents of schools report that a 
considerable class who have been available as teachers in the common 
schools have been carried away by the boom that recently swept like a 
swollen river down the great central valley, but whose backwater is 
now the cause of a temporary stagnation in enterprise and often of 
serious depression among large bodies of people. It is from a region 
like this and the adjacent portions of States like Tennessee, Virginia, 
and North Carolina that this drift is most apparent. The superior strata 
of country boys, discouraged by the scanty returns of the ordinary 
method of farming that still '^ lingers shivering on the brink and fears 
to launch away,'' are everywhere setting their faces toward some rising 
sun, real or apparent. The aml)itious and bright girls are wearying of 
the home life, which was all the mothers and grandmothers knew, and, 
spite of the eloquent pleadings of the rural clergy and the glowing- 
pictures of rural felicity drawn by the magazine poets, are making the 
best of time toward the 350 ways of earning a resj)ectable living for a 
woman found at the great centers of the new national life. It is simply 
w^asted breath to scold or entreat them to stay. Some of them may not 
find what they seek; but all of them will measurably satisfy the great 
longing of American youth for a broader and more stirring environ- 
ment; greatei' opportunities for doing their best; social, religious, and 
educational privileges for their own children as they come on, better 
than they or their ancestors have yet known. At present there is a 
moderate call for their services in the score of new industrial centers 
growing in local importance up and down the valleys. But lyifor- 
tunately only a limited number of these young people have the train- 
ing essential for the positions of expert clerks, engineers, foremen, or 
skilled workmen of any sort. These places, often very desirable, are 
now filled very largely by young men and women prepared for such 
work elsewhere; oftenerthau otherwise from the neighboring Northern 
States. The same disability to take advantage of the situation is found 
among a large class of the rural population. The director of a great 
raining x)lant in this country stated that, for several years after the 
beginning of his enterprise, he was comiielled to keep on his rolls twice 
the number of men required for actual service in order to obtain the 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWEbTERN VIRGINIA. 907 

needed work. Thus, while other portions of the country are receiving 
many of the superior youth who often would be better oft' at home, the 
educational facilities of these twenty-tive counties are neither sufficient 
in quantity nor of the peculiar quality or adaptation to hvmg out these 
50,000 children and youth in a way required to meet the demands of 
the swiftly coming- years. Yet there is no body of American youth that 
a wise and progressive educator would regard as better material for the 
coming race than is found in this later region which has patiently 
bided its time, now almost three hundred years, awaiting this summons 
to launch into the coming life of the Commonwealth. 

One of the drawbacks of Southern education here, as everywhere, 
is the power of a noisy class of second-rate political and social leaders 
to excite and prejudice even the better sort of people to resent every 
true statement of the educational situation as another attack on the 
South and a fresh outcome of sectional misrepresentation and hostility. 
Happily, this spirit is not apparent m the superior educators in this or, 
indeed, in any portion of the South. Kowhere have we found this 
class, including a large proportion of the clergy of all denominations, 
more thoroughly sensible of the gravity of this demand and more 
strenuous in their efforts to supply the crying need. But the South, 
everywhere to-day, is confronted with a peril not yet sufficiently appre- 
ciated even when most apparent. In its natural desire to protect itself 
from the great danger of the early days of reconstruction, the govern- 
ing of great States and communities by the newly emancipated freed- 
man, the ruling class has not counted sufficiently on the more formidable 
peril of these States and cities falling into the eclipse of an indefinite 
period of rule by the great mass of illiterate and untrained people of 
their own race, under a leadership often more reckless and not half so 
enlightened as the far-famed '• carpet-bagger " of bygone days. For the 
present, it seems that all these States, even the oldest and most cele- 
brated, will be in the hands of this rising "third estate," less in touch 
with the higher American civilization than any similar body of American- 
born people in the Union. All that has yet been done for the uplift of 
the new South, especially for the educational advancement of its people, 
is really to a great extent the work of the old superior class, under the 
wise and courageous leadershij) of the best men and women in every 
community. It Avill require all the wisdom, worth, and culture of this 
portion of Southern society for more than one decade to meet this ris- 
ing tide from beneath that, under various names, is every day gaining 
in volume and power. Thisinfluenceisalreadydominatingin educational 
affairs. It is already seen that large numbers of this class are not only op- 
posed to any support, even of the secondary, much lessof the higher edu- 
cation by the State, but are far more hostile to the uplift of the colored 
folk than their old masters. Indeed, the work already done for the 
education of the negro in the State schools has been chiefly under the 
influence ami direction of the peojde that knew him best and, by all 
odds to-day, are his most valued friends. The alarming outbreak of 
lawlessness that is now exciting the whole countiy and is nowhere 
more dreaded and feared than by the best people of the comnmnities 
where it appears, is but another outcome of this ui)heaval from below, 

IS^owhere is this danger so threatening as in many of these new towns 
and industrial centers of the entire highland and valley regions of the 
old central South. I find numbers of these towns thronged with fam- 
ilies drifted in from the remote country, drawn thitlier from the lower 
strata of tlse new foreign immigration, often the vilest refuse of the 
vagrant negro population. These people come with a houseful of chil- 



908 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

dren, needing all that the home, the church, and the school can do 
for tlieir traininii' into respectable citizenshi]). The home is too often 
the weakest of all these forces, either throngh sheer poverty or the 
mental and moral incapacity of the jiarents. The church and clerfjy 
are waking np and vigoi-ously working the ordinary church methods 
of the periodical revival, the Sunday school, Yonng Men's Christian 
Association and temperance movements, with other schemes of useful 
reformation. But the clergy are terribly overworked through all this 
portion of the country. Many of them are com[)elled to minister in 
several places, often miles apart, reached during the winter in the 
laborious southeru way throngh a battle with mnd, bad roads and 
changeful weather, especially ke]>t going as constantly as the country 
doctor by the demands of a parish work that includes miles of a wide 
country side. The most effective method of dealing with this youthful 
crowd is by a good school established in every locality, rnral and vi 
lage, taught by a worthy, intelligent^man or woman, who will be mor 
than the oidinary pedagogue, the "guide, philosopher, and friei.d" c 
the little people; at once training the head, the heart, ami tbe banc 
and holding up before these young Americans the knowledge of th 
great opportunity that in a near future lies just outside the schoo 
house door. 

But here is, just now, the most critical feature of the situation. W 
found scarcely a village in this entire district where the educationa 
arrangements were in any reasonable way adequate to the emergency. Ij 
several important places the public school hardly existed, or was in a con 
dition so nearly useless that it was painfully unfit for even the elenientar; 
schooling of the small nund)er who were found in ii. We doubt if ii 
any place visited two-thirds of the children between 6 and 12 were ii 
regular attendance in any school of any value. The boys on Avhon 
these communities nmst rely for their male citizenship are drifting on 
of school at the age of 12, seldom better occupied outside than insid* 
even the poor arrangement for education on tlie ground. While sev 
eral of these villages were getting new and improved school buildings 
I found but one where the people seemed to recognize the necessity 
for a well-organized graded school system under competent superiu 
tendency, in the hands of fit teachers sufficient for the growing popu 
lation during a session long enough to be of real service. 

In the open country I could not hear of any especial ])rogress adequate 
to the great need of the people. Schoolhouses too often unfit for occu- 
pation; teachers working at from $20 to §30 per month for what is 
called a term of five months in the year; county superintendents paid 
so little that it is almost impossible to entice an expert into the work, and, 
added to these disabilities, the interference of local and State politics, 
often sectarian, religious, and social jealousies. We found the people 
whose influence and cooperation is necessary to hold up an effective sys- 
tem of popular education generally incredulous, almost despairing of the 
possibilities of sustaining a school system adequate to the advancing 
needs of the population. I n the present con dition of affairs the superior 
iamilies in the country districts are anxiously lookiiig about for some 
way to educate their children, leaving the farms for the vdlages, send- 
ing off their boys and girls at a tender age to distant schools, too often 
not able to avail themselves of the opportunities of the academical 
institutions which are scattered up and down the region. In almost 
every village the establishment of new colleges or private schools for 
instruction of the better-off pu]>ils leaves this ir.fluential portion of the 
community antagonistic or inditiereut to the fate of the common school, 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 909 

^vliore two thirds of the children must be ednenfed, if at all. In short, 
all the difticiiltics against whicii Ur. Kuffiier and the early superintend- 
ents of education so bravely struggled are iiere, still on the ground, 
somewhat overcome by the experieiu-e of the past twenty years, but 
still a niiglity obstacle. And the important fact is that while the 
industrial life of this great realm has shot ahead so marvelously during 
the past ten years, and the promise of a new future is brightening: the 
sky, the educational public outside a few institutions and localities 
does not seem to have really sensed the situation, but is going on at 
the gradual pace that wc-uld have been helpful in the days that are 
past, but which is altogether behind, the imperious demands of the 
X)rescnt time. 

Of course, the suggestions of a stranger are never quite welcome, 
even if he is able to see the point of dilticulty. But, iu this essay, I 
do not offer theories, or make comparisons, or endeavor to place the 
responsibility for i")ast or present conditions. I sim])ly put on paper 
what is the talk of every superior school man or woman, eveiy wise 
clergyman, every thoughtful public man, every man of affairs who sees 
what is coming to this favored region; especially of every good woman 
who, from the home and social mount of observation, is prospecting 
the status of her neighborhood in the swift coming years. If there is 
anything of value in the suggestions of this essay, the writer only 
claims the merit and assumes the responsibility of putting on pai)er in 
reasonable shape what is the common reporli of the superior educa- 
tional public which is still expected to i)ut on the ground these great 
agencies of civilization. And the encouragement of the work is that, 
in every community, there are decided indications that the present con- 
dition is a state of transition, and this important portion of the coun- 
try is not now and will be less and less content with the present oppor- 
tunities as the years go on. 

In contrast with a new State like Texas, an old commonwealth like 
Virginia, with an influential cultured class, chiefly trained by the edu- 
cational methods of a generation ago, encounters serious diiiiculties in 
putting on the ground an effective system of schools for the masses. 
The people who need it most are often least awake to its necessities. 
The educated portion of the community, always the minority, finding 
the progress so slow and deeply anxious for the schooling of their own 
children, can not await the tardy development of the common schools, 
but look to established institutions or extemporized i^rivate arrange- 
ments to do the imperative work. 

Until 1870, southwest Virginia, with what is now West Virginia, 
seemed reasonably content with tJie old-time Southern system — essen- 
tially the British system of half a century ago — a scheme of colleges 
and academies for such as could afford their expense and aspire to their 
training, and the field school or poor school of the past, with a wide- 
spread illiteracy that was never rej^orted in statistical tables and only 
known to the class of progressive educators on the^round. The result 
is that there are now, in .southwestern Virginia, a supply of colleges 
and academies with college names more than sufficient for all the rea- 
sonable demands of the genuine secondary and higher educational train- 
ing of the country for the next twenty years. The old drift of students 
to the Virginia schools from thefar Southwest is becoming sensil)ly less 
every year, because these States no longer are obliged to go northward, 
but find their new school systems every year more satisfactory. There 
is no educational reason why Louisiana should send her superior boys 
and girls beyond Tulane University and its annex, the Sophie jS^ewcomb 



910 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

College, it being in all matters of organization, present efficiency, and a 
rational expectation for the future, the equal of any institution for the 
best discipline and instruction of a Southwestern student. Texas is 
becoming a land of good graded village, improving academical, excel- 
lent normal, and promising State university schooling. The nearer 
States are alive with the development of this class of institutions. It 
would therefore seem useless to build up collegiate or academical seats 
of learning beyond the present immediate necessities of the home pop- 
ulation, especially in this portion of Virginia, where the demand is for 
the popular schooling of the masses and a broader education of the 
secondary and higher departments. 

There are now in this portion of Virginia three collegiate foundationfc 
for boys, which, yjroperly supported, generouvsly endowed, and handled 
in the spirit of the advancing college and university life of the time, 
will be ample for the home schooling of these twenty-five counties 
for years to come — the State Agricultural and Mechanical College at 
Blacksburg; Eoanoke College, at Salem, and Emory and Henry Col- 
lege, at Emory. Each of these is now in excellent condition, as far as 
a comjjetent faculty, adequate curriculum, and arrangements for the 
thorough schooling of its students are concerned, to do a great work, 
adaiJied especially to the needs of the district. With extensive knowl- 
edge of similar institutions in every Southern State, I am sure that 
under its present management, no one of them is ready to do better 
than the State Agricultural and Mechaincal College at Blacksburg. If 
the farmers of the most attractive agricultural country awaiting a 
broader development in the Union will heartily stand by this institu- 
tion and the railroad and manufacturing interests will cooperate with 
the State in giving to it the lielping hand and aid in the organization 
of a thorough system of industrial training through the entire coun- 
try, there will be no educational opportunity more to be envied than 
is open to this in a future near at hand. IJoanoke College, at Salem, 
through the activity of its enthusiastic and far-sighted young presi- 
dent, is already known in some of the great centers of educational activ- 
ity in the North. Boston could do nothing better than supply it with 
the endowment to educate hundreds of tlie sort of vigorous and am- 
bitious young men that are now under instruction. Emory and Henry, 
in situation and sufticiency of buildings, is ready to welcome 500 stu- 
dents and renew its youth. Its crying need, like the majority of South- 
ern colleges, is money to enable it to work its machinery and hold on 
to the class of capable young professors that can be had for the proper 
support in all these States. 

All these institutions liaA^e adopted the elective curriculum and are in 
esvsential respects in vital sympathy with the best tendency of the uni- 
versity and college life of tiie day. It would be a gracious thing, and 
no less just than generous, if the men of wealth who have gone out 
from southwestern Virginia during the past twenty-five years and now 
are found among^the crowd of millionaires in several of the northern 
and western cities, would " remember the rock out of which they were 
hewn" and repeat the work so splendidly done by a similar class of 
prosperous men in the New England and Northein States, whereby 
almost every worthy college from Boston to San Francisco has been 
generously endowed and magnificent new foundations laid since the 
close of the civil war. Here, as in northern Ahibama and other por- 
tions of the South, we are glad to take note of the far-sighted gen- 
erosity of some of the railroad, land, and maiuifacturing companies 
recently established, in giving sites for schooihouses and churches; con- 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 911 

tributiug, sometimes generously, and in some cases actually building 
schoolhouses and supporting free schools for operatives and workmen. 
A great deal more of this sort of work could be done in southwestern 
Virginia by these great wealthy corporations which to-day almost 
hold this splendid country in the hollow of their hands; done, not only 
to their own pecuniary advantage, but, what is of far more importance, 
to tlie uplifting of the masses of the people, on which all the highest 
success of their own investment will depend. There is an admirable 
foundation already laid through the great service of President Cocke, 
of Hollius Institute, in a near suburb of the new city of lioanoke, for 
a woman's college of the type of Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, 
in a beautiful and healthful region, with amjile buildings for a great 
beginning, at the headquarters of the new development of southwest- 
ern Virg-inia. An investment of a million would place here a great 
school of the higher type and perpetuate the well-earned reputation of 
this well known institute, for the past forty years one of the most nota- 
ble of Southern schools. 

Of the secondary schools for girls the same can be said as concerning 
the colleges for boys. There are more than enough in number to su])- 
ply the actual need of this region for a generation to come. Under the 
varicms titles. College, Institute, Seminary, they all, with the usual 
variations of good, indifferent, and poor, are of the same sort; all schools 
for the secondary education, compelled by circumstances to assume, on 
the one hand, something of the higher and, oftener, of the elementary 
training of their pupils. 

The radical infirmity of the Southern educational situation is the weak- 
ness of its elementary department. In the vast open country and in the 
majority of little hamlets that hardly rank as villages, both the public 
and private schools for children under the age of 15 are oftener tlian 
otherwise of the sort that nobody is satisfied with save their teachers 
and their " kinfolk and acquaintance." The result is that when the 
girl whose parents are able to meet the cost, and, more and more, even 
the daughter of the humbler family, assisted by some friend or church 
or the kindness of her teachers, reaches the verge of American young 
ladyhood, she is filled with the desire for a better education and goes 
with the increasing throng that crowds the ijrivate secondary school to 
repletion, sometimes even to the peril of health. The school, even of 
average worth, generally has one or more superior teachers and often is 
able to give a thorough training in its curriculum, including music and 
boarding-school art. But here comes in the drawback. The majority 
of these pupils are neither by habits of study, mode of life, or elemen- 
tary knowledge, in any fit condition to enter upon a genuine course of 
the secondary education. Time is flying; young womanhood, with all 
the bewitchment of the genial social life of the southland and the be- 
wildering mirage of early marriage, is waiting outside the schoolhouse 
door. To go back to the proper work of childhood and learn honestly 
and well the few things indispensible to scholarship, culture, and true 
refinenient seems a moral impossibility. To launch forth on the untried 
ocean of the higher branches, music and art, has at least the attraction 
of novelty. The latter is the ordinary conclusion. Spite of the mis- 
givings of their teachers, the situation is A^hat it is and the crowded 
curriculum, includingLatin, is adventured upon and buff etted with like 
a strong or faii^t swimmer fighting an Atlantic surf. A portion of the 
managers of these schools are seriously trying to shorten the course, 
leave out superfluities, and give these pupils a moderate task, with the 
hope of better results. But here come in the ignorance and ambition of 
13441 3 



912 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

])arents, wlio insist ou lia"ving the worth of their money in all the lux- 
uries of the great modern feast of knowledge. The intense rivalry be- 
tween the denominational seminaries, in which the spirit of an ardent 
sectarian i)ropagandism blends with the natural desire for success, and 
the absolute necessity of numbers to the existence of the institution, 
make it very difficult to introduce any reform in the direction of thor- 
oughness and limitation of studies. The few superior girls whose health 
is adequate to the tremendous toil imposed by such an undertaking, 
often amid an environment so unfavorable, come out with honor and 
frequently complete their studies at schools of higher grade in better 
condition to do valuable work. The larger crowd of social, faint-hearted, 
or frivolous girls get on in their own way and graduate into the class 
of women who perpetuate the defects of this tyi)e of seminary by 
enthusiastically pushing their own daughters into the same condition 
of affairs. 

It can not be truly said that the teachers of the institutions are 
chiefly resi)onsible for this state of affairs. Indeed the quality of their 
teachers is steadily improving and no school of any mark is wanting 
in one or several Avho come from the highest seminaries with well de- 
served commendation. But the one thing that no teacher can do is to 
reconstruct, in one or two years, the disheveled mind of a girl, until 
15 " fussed with " in the regulation private village or in the ordinary 
common country school. The problem is, OJi the one hand, to build 
from the foundation the scholarly mind, or at least to form soine honest 
and effective habits of study and, on the other, to feed to this pupil as 
much of the rich food of the abundant bill of fare as can be digested. 
Nobody so well knows the difficulties of the situation as the superior 
instructors of this class of female colleges, and our sketch of their 
trials will be recognized with painful assent. 

A way out of this everglade of female education of the secondary 
sort, from which no part of our country is exempt, is already being 
found on more than one side. One excellent reform is inaugurated by 
the courageous body of teachers who resolutely set their faces against 
the old British fetich of everlasting Latin. No competent educator 
questions the great value of classical education, when it is both classi- 
cal and educp^tional. But the carricature of classicism that the ordi- 
nary grind of boarding-school Latin for boys and girls becomes de- 
serves all the disparagement visited upon it even by the anti-classic 
advocates of exclusively scientific and industrial instruction. Tliat a 
girl of 15, for whom there are only two or three years of remaining school 
life, with no reliable habits of study, unable to spell or cipher or write 
a page of respectable English, at sea in the history of her own coun- 
try, with no information of natural science and no acquaintance with the 
wiiters of her own land, to say nothing of English literature, enthused 
with the desire to take the extras of nuisic and painting, should be shut 
<lown to the study of an ancient language whii^h, if superficial, is of no 
worth, and, if thorough, must absorb the major part of her mental ener- 
gies, may still be accepted as truth by a class of teachers, but is less appar- 
entevery year to the solid American common sense. Could a few more cour- 
ageous managers of these schools make the ncAv departure of admit- 
ting to the exclusive course only such as by training, mental habit, and 
taste are competent and insist that the average pupil shall be honestly 
dealt with on the lines of a solid English training, with guarded elec- 
tion of modern languages or the accomplishments, the objective point 
being to send her forth with an ardent desire for improvement and a 
habit of good reading of the best liter^/ture pf her native tongue, the 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 913 

work would be well begun. We found several of these schools where 
tlie condition of graduation is a high grade of excellence in sj)elling, 
elementary arithmetic, and the use of the mother tongue. These schools 
will groAv with the sensible ideas of woman's education in the country. 
There is no implied disparagement of the higher education of women 
in these strictures. But all high things in the material or spiritual 
world are based on broad and deep foundations among the common 
things of life, and the success of the higher education in college or 
academy depends, for boys and girls, on this laying of the corner stone 
and broadening and strengthening the base. Here is the tragedy of 
college life for boys; compelling all these institutions either to supj)ort 
an expensive preparatory department or to work in the upper story 
witli material so unlit that the best ])rofessors are discouraged and can 
only be held by the missionary spirit from accepting the constant in- 
vitation to "go up higher." 

Another method of dealing with this embarrassment is the establish- 
ment of a genuine department of pedagogy in every school of the sort, 
with an elementary department, managed at once as a school of the 
best type for children and a model for the observation of young- teach- 
ers, by .the principal of the entire department. There are in the South 
a great number of admirable women, whose presence in this capacity 
would put a new soul into many a dull and dreary college for girls. 
This arrangement would offer to a family desirous of giving a full 
course of instruction to their girls the oi)portunity of beginning the 
work in season. It would supply the higher departments of the insti- 
tution with a central corps of trained pupils in every grade, well taught, 
all the way up. It would be an inspiration to a large class of grown 
girls, sadly needing the training of children, to go back to this enticing 
occupation, which makes the observation of the luitural methods of 
instruction, even the participation in this beautifid work, the greatest 
pleasure for the most cultivated minds. It would give an impulse to 
the whole range of nature studies and change the often senseless work 
of tlie art and music department, by laying the foundations of both in 
the thorough instruction of children, according to the methods so 
effectual in the best graded schools; only in this way can the i^ublic 
school system of the open country be supplied with teachers compe- 
tent to lift them out of the present slough of inefficiency, because these 
graduates would be able to work for such compensation as the people 
can afford, and thoroughly interested in the uplift of childhood and 
youth in their own communities. . In this and similar directions can 
these schools be steadily improved, until they become genuine semi- 
naries of the secondary education, which is all the vast majority even 
of the better sort of young women anywhere are able to obtain. 

It will be a blessed day for education in Virginia when the old-time 
contemi^t for the common school is dispelled, both by the improvement 
of the common school itself and a broader and more philosopliic idea of 
education ai«d its relation to American society. At jiresent, the per- 
petual sprouting of new private and denominational schools, with high 
sounding names, for the gathering together of the daughters and sons 
of the more favored families, is one of the serious hindrances to the fit 
schooling of the people, and works for the perpetuation of the reign of 
superficiality. Few of these schools can secure the teaching force nec- 
essary to the successful schooling of their pupils, while they absorb the 
money and interest of the class that is most needed to build up an eflect- 
ive system for the community. It would be a great step forward if 
the trustees of half these little seminaries, now starving under deuomi- 



914 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

national auspices, could place tlieir properties in the hands of the com- 
mon school board, at least for the elementary departments ; if necessary, 
retaining the secondary as a high school, with tuition. In this way 
'' the first step that costs, " the housing a graded school in suitable build- 
ings, could be taken. Many of these village academies have large build- 
ings and am]>le grounds which, with proper repairs and ornamentation, 
would be sufticieut for the public use for a generation, leaving the people 
to apply the scliool funds to the proper work of instruction. This has 
been done largely in New England, and is so common in the South that 
we often feel impatient at seeing the educational business of the smaller 
towns in a deadlock, from the obstinacy of boards of trustees, or some- 
times of only individual owners of these properties, which were often con- 
tributed by the people for general education in the earlier days. With 
this clearing of the ground many a town could aiford the establishment 
of a good high school department, on the shoulders of the graded school 
of the better sort, enabliug the people to keep their children at home 
until the final necessity for their going abroad. 

Then the great schools now being founded through this region, includ- 
ing those of established reputation, could have some reasonable hope of 
fit endowment and, with increasing numbers, could rise to a fair com- 
parison with similar institutions in other i)arts of the country. There 
are hiilf.a, dozen of these schools of the superior sort, so good and under 
an administration so wise and progressive, that we long to see them 
recognized and put in a condition where the hand-to-mouth support on 
which they now live will be overcom'e and their managers be able to 
inaugurate the reforms nearest their hearts. 

The idea of a free high school in each county, supplementing the 
country district school, is destined to materialize in some localities in 
the not distant future. Until the Southern peoiDle, far more than at 
present, live in cities or large villages, tliis would be an admirable and 
practicable provision for the schooling of many who can not afford even 
the moderate expense of the academies now on the ground. Such a 
school might combine instruction in the liigher branches with normal 
and imlustrial training for both sexes and, if coeducational, would go 
far to convert the Southern people to this feature of modern educational 
progress. At present, the average private school for boys, in this sec- 
tion, suffers a i^rodigious drawback in the frequent lack of discipline, 
good order, neatness, and all the higher conditions of school life, not 
oidy from its obstinate isolation of sex, but often from the i)eculiarities 
of an old-time habit of general shiftlessness that makes school life itself 
a demoralizing occupation. The s<;hools of the academical sort for boys 
in southwestern Virginia are few in number and, generally, of inferior 
quality to the seminaries for girls. This is j^robably due to the fact 
that the number of girls in secondary schools is already much larger 
than of the boys, and the disparity is yearly increasing. The Southern 
boy generally concludes to go to college or to leave school before the 
age of 14. In the former case he goes to a college with a preparatory 
school department, leaving the ordinary intermediate schools. Outside 
these, we find a few seminaries for boys of high grade, for special prepa- 
ration for the universities ; although sometimes these are of the old-time 
tyj)e, out of elbow touch with the best in the education of the coumiu- 
nities in which they abide. The coeducational graded iniblic school is 
now the most vital element in the educational life of the South, when 
it is properly organized, placed above the reach of ijolifcical, sectarian, 
or social interference, and i)ut into the hands of a competent superin- 
tendent "with power to act." 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 915 

But the root of the matter must be found iu a great revival of the 
commou school interest in city, viHage, and open country. Here is the 
original clearing of the forest of illiteracy in the draining of the slongh 
of ignorance, superstition, sliiftlessness, vulgarity, and vice, without 
which the secondary and higher education in a country like oiu'S can 
only result in an occasional success; even a majority of its own students 
fatally handicapjDed by a neglect of the foundations in early childhood 
and youth. It is not necessary to empliasize the unsatisfactory condi- 
tion, in this region, ev'Cnof the village schools for the people, much less 
to insist on the failure of the average country scliool to give the neces- 
sary training for the American citizenship of the present day. Our 
people, everywhere, must shake oft' the pleasing delusion that things 
are now as they were half a century ago, when there were no great 
cities, even in the most i)opu]ous States, and the rude boys came up to 
town in various conditions of ignorance of letters, wi^hno special train- 
ing, from the remote rural districts, and by a sharp fight for success, 
in half a lifetime secured wealth and consideration in communities made 
up of i^eople of the same sort as themselves. But to-day a young man, 
with a corresponding lack of x)reparation, finds himself in Roanoke, 
Bristol, Radford, face to face with half a dozen bright fellows, trained 
in the best schools for any and every service for commerce, manufac- 
tures, or mechanics; and straightway "moves on" to a crude cultiva- 
tion out on some borderland, or becomes discouraged and " gives him- 
self away" to the crowd of worthless and reckless youth that haunt 
these places and make life hideou's to every well-intentioned man. The 
only condition of meeting the lequirements even of a progressive agri- 
culture is the solid foundation of the education in the elements that 
could ]je well given in a good country district school, properly housed, 
with a competent teacher and moderate library and session of six or 
eight months in the year. There could the foundations of a fair school 
training be laid, a taste for reading and a habit of study formed, with a 
valuable training in " good morals and gentle manners "and, abov^e all, 
a hunger and thirst after knowledge and an elevated idea of American 
citizenship be matured which would lead on like a guiding star, high 
in the heaven of youthful aspiration, to any possible achievement. 

We are often enough reminded that the Southern common school, 
especially for the negro, has been a failure, at best sending forth its 
graduates unfit for the life they must lead and with no fitness for that 
to which they blindly aspire; Wt, pray, what can be expected of such 
a life as can be seen by a traveler in thousands of these common schools — 
the schoolhouse cheerless, unwholesome, and repugnant to all ideas of 
decency; an ignorant, conceited, often vulgar and sometimes vicious 
teacher, working on a salary below that of the waiters in the hotels of 
the neighboring villages; a mob of children, studying out loud, demor- 
alized by the disorder and violence that invariably attend such a gath- 
ering; a third of the pupils only in occasional, and not half in what is 
called " daily attendance;" working against the disgust or absolute 
neglect of the better sort, and worried by the miserable jealousies and 
local feuds of the lower order of its patrons ? Just what we do get! A 
failure that is imputed to the system itself and gives new occasion to 
ventilate the old " wise saw" that the lower strata of humanity are 
better off in ignorance, as they are only pushed by education out of 
their sphere. Every community that tolerates an educational abortion 
of this sort is certain to meet retribution, pressed down and overflow- 
ing, in the increased barbarism of its humbler and the steady desertion 
of its better population. 



916 EDUCATION REPOET, 1890-91. 

We are not insensible to the difficulties that beset many of these 
communities in the effort to maintain a comx)etent system of schooling 
which shall at once educate the lower and at the same time reasonably 
satisfy the higher elements of its people. The financial obstacle, how- 
ever, is real or imaginary according to the spirit of the population. 
There is no district of southwestern Virginia which does not spend on 
things unnecessary, even harmful and pernicious, twice the money 
needed to establish a satisfactory system of education. There is no 
county where the ])eox)le do not waste, in hauntiug the courts and fee- 
ing the local lawyers, enough time and cash to build a good schoolhouse 
in every district. People have what their hearts are set upon. Tlie 
bottom necessity is a revival of the educational spirit tlirough the length 
and breadth of this beautiful country, until, instead of brooding down 
among the hollows, the peoi)le shall lift their eyes to the uplands of a 
noble iiride in State, country, and humanity, which will be content with 
nothing less than their full share of the great American heritage for 
every boy and girl in every s])here of life. Tliis once awakened, the 
same si)irit tluit drove the young men from their homes a generation 
ago to light in a cause they held to be just and true, with a bravery 
and endurance that won the admiration of the world, will marshal their 
sons and daughters to-day in a grander war against the illiteracy which 
is the one American peril to all the true patriot and Christian holds 
dear. This done, ways and means will be found to build and furnish 
the schoolhouse; to find the good teacher, even if hunted for with a 
lighted pine knot; to watch the going on of the school with more jealous 
care than the political campaign; to make it the fundamental business 
and the most exhilarating recreation of every neighborhood to encour- 
age the little ones in their wrestling with the daily trials, humiliations, 
aiul sorrows of life in the country district school. 

But where shall be found the " evangelist " to wake up the people and 
hold them at the concert pitch of obstinate determination to se(;ure for 
the children and youth this precious boon of education"? Certainly not 
largely in the present system of county supervision, which by common 
consent has become one of the chief obstacles to the success of the 
common schools. There would seem to be no reasonable expectation 
that the State or the county can at present ofi'er the salary to entice an 
educational expert to this work, or even to obtain from a competent 
man anything but the most perfunctory service. Eeal supervision is 
the backbone of every educational system. The best college or second- 
ary school depends upon it, in the president or principal chosen espe- 
cially for this business. What would become of any superior school if 
the teacher of each class and room was left to carry on his work at his 
own sweet will, like the only teacher in the average common school? 
We are not unmindful of the self-sacrificing service of a noble band of 
these superintendents, whose works praise them in the valleys and on 
the hillsides of more than one region blessed by their missionary zeal. 
But millionaires and martyrs do not march in regiments, even in such 
notable centers of moral and religious life as some of these towns are 
declared to be by their enthusiastic secular "boomers." The ordinary 
public man rarely does more than he is i)aid to do, whatever the people 
who " pay the shDt " expect of him. The work in the ordiimry office of 
superin tendency of schools is largely the performance of a clerk, a per- 
functory examination of candidates for teachers' certificates, a semi- 
occasional hasty visit to the schoolhouse of his beat, a bland com- 
pliance with the humors of influential peo[)le, and an eloquent laudation 
of the educational state of the county on the stump or in the report to 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 917 

headquarters in the othce of liis chief. All this when the election or 
appointment of this class of ofticials is carried on with the best inten- 
tions. Bnt when this choice is bnrdened with the whims of a personal 
or political interest, or entangled in any one of the score of methods 
that are the di'y rot of pnblic life, the resnlt is wliat we see, in the de- 
feat of all the advantages real supervision is believed to offer. 

We believe that, in place of this fooling with a good thing, a system of 
district superintendence by experts chosen in the best way to assure the 
best results, paid enough to secure the entire success of trained officials, 
could be sustained with })rotit. When the bishop of a religions body comes 
around, tlie peoi)le crowd the churcli, the clergy hang upon his presence 
and take heart from his words of hope, caution, and good cheer; the 
women come out in theirbest, the children rejoice, and the day becomes 
a festival remembered for a year. A tit man or woman, recognized as 
fit, will do more to wake up a community even by a letter, like an epistle 
■ of St. Paul, than a common man drifting in and out every day of the 
year. Tiie peojjle recognize' their genuine rulers and do not fail to give 
honor where honor is due. The State of Massachusetts, which does 
most for education according to its population of any State, and which 
from the first "has done more for education than any American com- 
monwealth and is not behind the i)resent in its care for the children, 
supervises its schools by a secretary of the board of education and a 
corps of half a dozen trained assistants. But the superintendent is 
not a politician ^' on the make '' for a higher place, and each gentleman 
of the board is a man of national reputation, always on his beat, droj)- 
ping into the humblest little country school, encouraging and instruct- 
ing the teacher, stirring up the country people, gatheriug the school 
• committees of the towns into associations, conducting institutes, "work- 
ing like a horse " all the year round. What is to himler a State of less 
population than Massachusetts from concentrating her insufficient little 
salaries of county superintendents into a State fund to keep in the 
field a coriis of trained experts of the best men and women of the Com- 
monwealth, to visit the cities and revive the towns, break up the fallow 
ground anil plant trees of life by the side of every stream and great 
forests on every mountain side"? Nothing but the obstinate prejudice 
that always keeps on the ground any dead-alive system of " how not 
to do it," with the little teasing ambition of people to hold a little useless 
office, that is the curse of our American civilization. A great man will j^et 
, be found — he may be even now on his way — who will waken the people 
' of this fair coiuitry of the Southwest so they will send up to the capi- 
tal a body of llepresentatives that will demand a reconstruction of the 
present inefficient method of haiuUing the schools of the country — 
handling and manipulating until the children seem to have only the 
' ^erumbs that tall under the tables, that the dogs do eat. The enterpris- 
ing State of Texas has found a way to success in the bringing forward 
' of the ablest women for the most important office of supervision of 
; Schools. The great West found out years ago that the male sex is not 
: an indispensable condition of fitness for superior school work in all de- 
; partments of educational activity. Virginia has "noble women not a 
..few" who are fully competent for this work of supervision, and who, if 
; sent forth on this message of love to the children, would bring forth the 
1 response that always comes from a true Southern community to any- 
' thing brave and efficient done by the humblest girl. 

Afew years ago, at a convention of the teachers of the State of ISTew 
^.Yoi-k, a resolution was passed, urging that, at least, one address on 
tthe subject of popular education should be given in every school 



918 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

district of the State during the coming year. Whether 12,000 orators 
responded we are not informed, but certainly nothing would better 
relieve the deadness and torxDor of the southern winter on these great 
hills and in the broad valleys like a widespread organization of com- 
mon school associations, holding frequent meetings in the churches 
and schoolhouses of every district, in behalf of the children and youth. 
The clergy would be foremost in this good work; as the ministers of 
New England, in the old time, were the guardians and strong friends 
of the little country schools and lyceums, out of which grew the public 
library, tlie lecture system, and the reading and thinking habits of the 
people. We are told that eloquence is on the decline. Perhaps it is 
true that the people are coming to demand facts and x>ractical instruc- 
tion in place of clerical highflying and supernatural vaticination in the 
pulpit, and are so worn out with the thunder of stump speaking that 
they prefer the fireside or the shade tree, with a respectable news- 
jiapei-, to the great speech of the regulation campaign orator. But 
surelj" if there be a cause in w^hich the dumb could speak, the silent 
fathers and mothers grow eloquent, the aspiring young man be lifted 
to enthusiasm and the maidens break forth into song, it would seem to 
be the uplift of 50,000 children and youth to welcome the coming dawn 
of such a destiny as will change tbe fate of the Old Dominion. For 
here it is not the rising up of another group of famous men to catch 
the eye of the imtions; but the drill of a generation of American boys 
and girls for the labors and discipline of a citizenshij) which nuikes 
every man a sovereign and every woman " the x^ower behind the 
throne." Such a revival would result in the awakening of the x)eople 
to the fact that only by local taxation and local supervision of schools 
can there be any permanent success. Thirty years ago, great armies 
in the southland fought to the death to testify to the rights of the 
State as oxiposed to the concentration of x^ower in the central govern- 
ment. What were the use of all this blood and sacrifice of men if, in 
her most vital interest, she must fall l)ack ux^on a halting and capri- 
cious legislature to originate every movement for the betterment of 
our schools? Eather should every city or district be emx)owered, under 
fit conditions and in suitable localities, to tax itself to the uttermost 
for the bottom interests of the State. The cry of the average x)oliticiau 
is still the old chestnut, that "taxation is tyranny," whereas taxation, 
wisely and vigorously imx^osed, is the lifeblood of republican civiliza- 
tion; taking out of one x^ocket to x^ut into another the money that 
brings to the children the precious instruction and discix^line without 
which democracy becomes a byword and a government of the x^eople 
and by the x)tJople only means anarchy and down-rushing destruction. 

We are glad to see that in several of these new villages, where the 
bulk of the negro poxuilation of this part of Virginia is fbuml, a fair 
arrangement is made for the children of this race. There is a sx)ecial 
call for this, as for another great crowd of children who flock to these 
towns that are sx)ringing n-p like a gourd in the night. If nothing else 
is done, this class of the x^ox^ulation must be taken in hand and lifted, 
by the combined eftbrt of school, church, and the awakened interest in 
social reform, to a sense of their x^osition and duty in a civilized coun- 
try. Eveiyone of these new mining towns or cities, with a people 
gathered from the ends of the earth, is a. magazine of untried barbar- 
ous foices which, unless controlled es])ecially by the fit education of 
the rising generation, will make it a citadel x^lanted against the x^eace 
and honor of the Commonwealth. 

We believe that one more great school for the training of colored 



EDUCATION IN SOUTHWESTERN VIRGINIA. 919 

youtli, like the Hampton Institute, could well be established at Bris- 
tol, already becoming a commanding center of educational interest. 
Here could be trained the teachers and clergy especially lit for the 
peculiar service among these people, as we see them in these villages 
and mining camps, and here could be organized the forces that would 
lilt up the race to good American citizenship and Christian brother- 
hood. 

It goes without saying that industrial education is bound to become 
a vital element in the school system of this [)ortion of Virginia. At 
present the vast majority of the people of southwestern Virginia are 
workers in the ordinary methods of farming, inured to hardship, de- 
pending on daily toil to support life. To the southwestern farmer it is 
not a sermon on the dignity of labor or a pitchfork behind his waist- 
band to propel him to his work, that is the crying need of the time. It 
is rather the better education of his boys and girls, the awakening and 
direction of vital force and a new ambition that will devise improved 
ways of tilling the earth, rotating and diversifying crops; opening the 
mind to that scientific agriculture which makes the land " a laboratory 
rather than a mine," making this fair realm blossom like the rose; and 
the exaltation of the family by the training in a style of home-making 
which demands the best culture and honors the most refined woman- 
hood. This can possibly be best achieved through the organization of 
farmers' associations, where the men and women of the country may 
come together at stated times', discuss methods and exhibit results, and 
make common stock of the superior ways of doing common work. We 
urge again thecheerful support of the State Agricultural and Mechanical 
College, under its present organization, as the center of the movement 
lor an improved agriculture. The crowning advantage of southwest- 
ern Virginia, as of Pennsylvania and Ohio, is, that under fit cultiva- 
tion the country can produce all that the largest population drawn to 
it by the development of mining and manufactures could demand for 
its sui)port. If the tarmers' sous and daughters will take heed to this 
and prepare themselves for the coming demand, there will be little need 
of seeking the northland of the cyclone and blizzard, or the southland 
of the flood and malaria, for the most complete success in the primal 
inofession of the tilling of the soil. 

There will be a great call for a trained class of mechanics and skilled 
oi)eratives, of all sorts required in a mining and manufacturing region, 
within a few years, in southwestern Virginia. The depression of the 
collapse of the real estate speculation will pass away and the people, 
here as elsewhere, will learn, that it is not by selling your old farm to 
your neighbor, taking pay in his own broad acres, with absurd overes- 
timated value, that budds up the material prosperity of a State. This 
portion of Virginia, like all others, must depend for its jjrosperity upon 
the value and enterprise of the greatindustrial establishments that are 
now making their homes in its valleys and penetrating its hillsides, A 
great school of technology at Roanoke would seem to be a necessity. 
Working in connection with the State, it might be an outlying annex 
of the Agricultural and Mechanical College, planted where the object 
lesson of a new manufacturing and railroad city would always be avail- 
able to the students. There Avould seem to be no reason why the great 
suc(;ess of the Tulane University at New Orleans should not here be 
repeated; the organization of a broad educational course of study, 
supplementing the classical and literary training, which would do much 
for the refresiiing of the regulation higher and secondary education. 
Many of these academies for girls could with great profit introduce a 



920 EDUCATION REPORT, 1890-91. 

department of skilled housekeeping]^, whicli would send the pupils 
home with a kuowletlge of eulighteued and refined housework, over- 
coming- the silly pride of laziness and elevating home-making to the 
place it deserves; the finest of all the fine arts and the most ]>ractical 
end of religion. A general shaking up of the old-time crude literary 
curriculum, flanked by a course of music and art, even at the i-isk of 
flying in tlie face of tradition, would be a helpful experiment. Now 
that the University of Virginia has called a graduate of the JMiller 
Manual Labor School to a position in connection with its board of In- 
struction and the Agricultural and Mechanical College has received 
several excellent young professors from this admirable school, it would 
seem that this portion of Virginia, beyond all others, could profit by 
su(;h a revival of industrial education. If a dozen great millionaires 
could be visited on their beds at night by the ghost of Father Miller, 
and good Dr. Vawter could enforce the solemn warning by a flank 
movement, like that of his old commander, Stonewall Jackson, on this 
vast mountain region, a dozen great schools, like this superb university 
of all work, might link together this glorious laud of mountain and 
valley by a chain of industrial Edens, waking up its 2,0(H>,0()0 people 
to their true destiny as members of a republic whose crown of glory is 
the exaltation of the jwor and lowly to the uplands of an intelligent, 
moral. Industrious and ])atriotic citizenshi]). 

But ail these good tilings, seen in vision by the hojieful educator, may 
fail in the realizaticni that gives them a foundation on the solid earth. 
Yet it is as true to-day in southwest Virginia as in Palestine, "Where 
there is no vision the peojde perish." And equally true is it that we 
are now living in the full light of the prophetic day when " the young 
men shall see visions." For, after all, even in the most progressive 
American Conuuon wealth it is upon the young men and women that 
we must rely for the agitation which wakes up the jjeople to a great 
spiritual need and the courage and persistence that insists that "Old 
things shall pass away and all things shall become new." 

And here is tlie new dominion of Virginia especially the favored land, 
even among the proudest of its sisterhood of States, in its coming gen- 
eration of young women. While the boys are thronging the great cit- 
ies of the i^ortheast and the new West, pushing towards the front 
wherever there is good work to be done, the girls are left behind. As 
in New England half a century ago in every town and village was 
found a crowd of aspiring young women, studying in the best schools, 
getting into communication with the great centers of culture and re- 
fined society and skilled industry, until the present year sees their 
daughters in possession of 350 ways of getting a respectable living, 
scattered all along from "away down East" to Alaska, up to every 
good American word and work; so do we behold the same inspiring' 
spectacle in the State of Mary and Martha W^ashington. In our edu- 
cational visitations up and down the State we are always in sight of a 
group of splendid girls, not a whit behind any former generation in all 
that has made the young Virginia woman the toast of a dozen genera- 
tions, but with a new inspiration and mighty hope overlooking and out- 
reaching longing for a life beyond the uttermost possibilities of the 
older time. It is no lack of loyalty to the past, no scorning of the 
sacred memories of the mothers and grandmothers, that is making; the 
name and opportunities of the new American womanhood so precious 
to many of these gracious daughters of the old Commonwealth. Their 
reverent love for the life that has forever past is the best assurance 
that the rising admiration -for fflie new life that beckons from the hori- 



Education in southwestern Virginia. 921 

Hon will be faithful and true ; implacable as the roots of their moun- 
tains; tender as the blue grass that drapes their slopes and nestles in 
their shy and shadowed coves. To them, more than to all others, is 
given the inauguration of the era of resurrection for this southwest 
Virginia that, even to the stranger tirst coming within her gates, ap- 
pears like what the old knights of the Golden Horseshoe named it — 
God's country — awaiting the providential call to rise up and become 
the promised land of the new dominion. First let the women of Vir- 
ginia demand the establishment of a genuine woman's university where 
the daughters, by the aid of the State, can share in the opi)ortuulty 
enjoyed by her sons for the j)ast seventy years. This aclneved, all good 
things will follow in their turn. Prophecies are delayed and dreams are 
forgotten, but predictions inspired by what may be seen by him who 
hath eyes to see and heard by him who hath ears to hear in the south- 
west Virginia of to-day are only the pledges of Providence to be re- 
deemed in God's own good time. 



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